What is a pilot’s watch?

Time+Tide

Getting into the minutiae of watch collecting can be daunting for a beginner with confusing French names and bewildering reference numbers. But luckily, sometimes it can be surprisingly simple. With much less stifling variety than dive watches and without the snooty preconceptions of dress watches, pilot’s watches generally stick to a few well-established styles and can be easily spotted thereafter thanks to their singular purpose. Let’s take a closer look at their history and traits.

The wristwatch as we know it today developed out of necessity for the troops of World War I, strapping watches to the wrist for convenience and durability. But even before that, pioneering pilots needed to keep their busy hands available.

An unlikely progenitor

The most famous example of what could be the first modern men’s wristwatch is the Cartier Santos-Dumont. Louis Cartier, at the request of the aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont, created that watch in 1904. Although they had not made the first wristwatch, the forward-thinking Swiss brand Zenith had trademarked the terms ‘Pilote’ and ‘Pilot’ in 1888 and 1904 respectively, giving them the sole rights to print the word ‘Pilot’ on watch dials to this day.

The Santos-Dumont eventually became available to the public in 1911, and Zenith also made a pilot’s watch for Louis Blériot’s English Channel crossing in 1909. The design of these two watches could not be further apart, with Cartier’s jewellery background coming through in the delicate, square case, and the Zenith looking more like a marine chronometer. The Cartier Santos has since become less of a pilot-centric model and has been built upon the dressiness, but the Zenith Pilot had much more of a long-term effect on the pilot style.

The influence of WWII

The Second World War is really where the most iconic pilot watch designs were cemented on both sides. RAF pilots largely used watches with black or white dials known as the 6B/159, manufactured by Omega, Longines, and Jaeger-LeCoultre. Sticking with a traditional look of poire hands and simple Arabic markers for quick legibility, they don’t quite fit the modern definition of a pilot’s watch aesthetic, but they were significant tools. The A-11 watches made for US troops by Elgin, Waltham and Bulova similarly operated on simplicity. One major development was with a derivative of the 6B/159 known as the CK2129 “Weems”, where a rotating bezel was added to help pilots calculate longitude. This idea that a pilot’s watch should aid with calculation would come back later in a big way.

The watches of the Luftwaffe were perhaps the biggest contributors to what we now consider pilot’s watches, which might come as a bit of a shock to the uninitiated. The first batches of B-Uhren watches were manufactured in 1940 and 1941, in two distinct styles. The first, known as Type A, had bold Arabic numerals and a triangle with two dots in place of the 12 o’clock marker. This aided fast legibility and orientation, generally in a large case that could even be worn over a flight jacket. Type B varieties moved the hour markers to an inner ring, while the outer markers displayed the minutes. The original five companies that made German pilot’s watches, now commonly known as fliegers, were A. Lange & Söhne, Laco, Stowa, Wempe, and IWC. Many of these companies still produce modern variations of those iconic designs, varying in degree of luxury.

After WWII, the focus for pilot’s watches shifted away from military use and into commercial planes. As technology developed, aircraft became more complex, and pilots needed more tools to aid them for longer journeys. Breitling, who were famed for their chronographs, were asked by the US Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association in 1952 to create something special for their members. The result was the Breitling Navitimer, including a logarithmic slide rule bezel popularised in 1940 to calculate average speed, distance travelled, fuel consumption, rate of ascent/descent, and conversion between miles, nautical miles, and kilometres. It’s debatable whether or not all that functionality was really necessary in aircraft that already had an instrument cluster, but the highly complex look undoubtedly became synonymous with pilot’s watches.

Pan-Am and the GMT-Master

Of course, when flying between countries, you can’t ignore the fluctuating time zones. Aside from a Longines-branded oddity from 1925, the Glycine Airman of 1953 was the first production watch to be capable of tracking two time zones simultaneously. It had a 24-hour dial and a rotating bezel to track the second time zone. Rolex quickly joined in with their GMT-Master of 1954, utilising an additional hand to track a total of three time zones. Initially supplied to Pan-Am pilots, the GMT-Master quickly became one of Rolex’s more popular models thanks to their marketing prowess. The GMT-Master II was introduced in 1981, and remains by far the most popular archetype for a GMT-capable pilot’s watch.

Over the years, they’ve increasingly become associated with travel in general, rather than pilot’s specifically, though there is an important distinction between the two common types of GMT watch. While you could read Jamie’s in-depth article about the caller vs traveller debate, what it boils down to is which hand of the watch is adjustable independently of others.

In a traveller GMT, the main hour hand can be jumped separately from the rest, usually in the first crown position. This is useful for those hopping through many different time zones and local times, allowing them to keep home time fixed on the GMT hand. Caller GMTs, on the other hand (pun fully intended), switch it up by having independent GMT hands and fixed main hour hands, useful for office workers who may need to frequently call into meetings in other time zones.

If you’re inspired to purchase based on this education piece, you’ll be glad to know that you have a lot of options for a great pilot’s watch. Whether it’s one of IWC’s super-luxury fliegers they make for Lewis Hamilton or a budget-conscious Seiko 5 Sports Style GMT, you can make your decision with the knowledge of how each feature came to be.