Do Pilots Ever Really Wear Or Need Pilot’s Watches? And A Guide To The Different Types
The pilot’s watch is perhaps the least clearly defined of all technical watch categories. What are they, and where and when are they worn?
It is generally assumed that actual working pilots have no need for, and therefore do not wear, pilot’s watches, in much the same way that divers don’t wear or need dive watches. The question, however, is worth looking at in greater depth because the answers can be surprising. To do so, we should look first at what a pilot’s watch is, since they have been around for as long as aviation itself and have had their forms and functions dictated by aviation requirements.
The pilot’s watch, unlike the diver’s watch, has no statutory definition and so figuring out what makes a watch a pilot’s watch can be a challenge. Diver’s watches are defined by ISO 6425, which has fairly specific requirements for everything from minimum necessary water resistance rating, to the presence of a one way timing bezel, to visibility, and even the testing regimens necessary for a watch to qualify. For pilot’s watches things are much more nebulous and what they are, and who wears them, has to some degree paralleled advances in aviation, cockpit instrumentation, and what type of aviation you’re talking about –and by the personal preferences of pilots.
Who Was First?
The first watch made for a pilot is usually said to be the Santos-Dumont, which was designed for the aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont by Louis Cartier, some time in the early 1900s. The date usually given for the design of the Santos-Dumont is 1904, although the date is difficult to verify independently and I have been able to find no photographs showing Santos-Dumont wearing the watch. The 1904 date is given by Franco Cologni in the 1998 edition of Cartier: The Tank Watch, although he also goes on to say that the date and origin story are “preserved as an oral tradition” at Cartier and that the earliest wristwatch actually in Cartier’s archives is a Tonneau from 1906. However, in 2019, Francesca Cartier-Brickell published her history of the family, The Cartiers, in which she goes into a great deal of detail on the relationship between Santos-Dumont and Louis Cartier, filling in a lot of blanks (both men were members of the prestigious Aero Club of France, for instance, and moved in very similar social circles). According to her, the genesis of the watch came from a complaint from Santos-Dumont to Louis Cartier that he had crashed one of his lighter than air ships in a timed race, due to his being forced to repeatedly consult a wristwatch. The Santos-Dumont became commercially available in 1911, so if Louis Cartier had created the first as a one off, Alberto Santos Dumont had it all to himself for seven years.
The first aircraft used in the first era of powered flight, were open cockpit and as performance improved, the need for sturdier watches increased. One example is a record setting flight by Roland Rohlfs, who in 1919, believe it or not, reached an altitude of 34,610 feet, in an open cockpit Curtis Wasp triplane; he wore a Depollier Field And Marine watch which had been designed to tolerate drastic temperature and air pressure changes (the Field And Marine is also the first known watch to have its water resistance verified by an independent testing agency – in this case, the US Army).
By the end of World War II, pilot’s watches had begun to evolve in different directions. Even before the war, aviation specific watches were being made, like the Longines Weems Second Setting watch and the Lindbergh Longines Hour Angle, both of which were navigation watches designed to work with the Weems system of air navigation. During the war, oversized, high precision pocket watch movements were adapted for use in the cockpit (the IWC B-Uhren) and pilot’s wrist chronographs were made as well (Hanhart and Tutima’s Fliegerchronographs) and there were of course, wristwatches from various makers which were designed to be accurate and readable under conditions of poor visibility, and with good enough legibility that they would not worsen the workload on the pilot.
Types Of Pilot’s Watches
Today, you can break down the various categories of pilot’s watches in a number of ways, based on their functionality.
First, there are watches with multiple time zones. These are handy for both pilots and passengers, of course, but they have their roots in the fact that in aviation, Universal Time Coordinated (formerly known as GMT and informally known as Zulu time) is the basis for all aviation operations (for obvious reasons and for the same reason that railroads had to get off mean local solar time and onto time zone-based civil time; you’re going to be filing a lot of insurance claims if you don’t).
Second, there are watches which are time-only, but which are designed to be especially physically sturdy and shock resistant, accurate enough for navigation purposes in a pinch, and which usually have some sort of antimagnetic shielding. Electrical currents in aircraft engine components can generate strong induced magnetic fields, so antimagnetic shielding became an intrinsic feature of many pilot’s watches (and non-pilot’s technical watches, especially for experimental scientists and engineers post WWII).
Third, there are chronographs. Elapsed time functionality is very useful in aviation, for everything from timing flight times and elapsed time in flight, to navigation, where the legs of a flight plan are designed around holding a certain speed, heading, and bearing for a given period of time.
Finally, there are watches with slide-rule bezels. The slide rule bezel is not only useful for calculations for flight operations, like fuel consumption, time over distance, distance over time, and average speed, but in pilot’s watches they usually have some additional markings which make them aviation-specific. Generally, slide rule bezels for pilot’s watches are based on the circular slide rule E6B flight computer, which incorporates additional functions for air navigation like charting drift due to changes in wind direction.
There is one notable pilot’s watch, or rather, group of pilot’s watches, which are as far as I know unique in their functionality and those are the Martin Baker watches from Bremont. Bremont introduced the Martin Baker/MB watches in 2009, in two versions – one was only available to military pilots who had actually ejected from an aircraft (I don’t know why I say, “from an aircraft” – what else would a pilot eject from? A bad relationship?).
The MB watches are unique in that they were specifically designed to tolerate the very high shock and g-forces associated with punching out of a stricken aircraft, which can produce acceleration loads as high as 20g, depending on the speed and altitude at which you eject. The testing regimen for the watches was developed at Bremont in a collaboration with Martin Baker and one of the watches was actually tested in an ejection seat. Generally speaking, pilot’s watches are less functionally specific than, say, diver’s watches, but “designed to tolerate the operation of an ejection seat” is about as use-case specific as it gets.
Pilots And Cockpits
There is a vast range of possible environments in which a pilot’s watch might be used. Even in civilian commercial aviation, you can have anything from private planes of various types and wildly varying sizes, to helicopters available in a very wide range of models and capacities, and each aircraft will have its own physical environment and therefore, offer its own unique opportunities for a watch to get banged around. Generally, quarters are tight in cockpits and depending on the position of controls and instruments, a watch could be safe as a Hummel in grandma’s china cabinet, or at constant risk of getting smacked into something; more often than not it is the latter.
Civilian pilots flying their own aircraft face a similar very wide range of possible environments, again depending on the aircraft, which can run the gamut from small single prop designs, to small personal jet aircraft. A lot of which watch such a pilot would wear depends on their flying habits, needs, and preferences – they’re a small percentage of Navitimer owners, but I’ve heard over the years from more than one general aviation pilot who actually uses the bezel on their watch (which I have taught myself to use six times so far and counting, and I always forget immediately after writing the article).
And then, there are military aviators. Again, there are so many aircraft types, even if you just take what’s currently in the air for various operators around the world, but in general, this is a very rough and tumble environment. I spent quite a bit of time for this story watching YouTube videos on carrier flight operations and catapult launches rattle your teeth, and landing does the same and that’s before you get into high G maneuvering during combat operations.
Bombers, tankers and transports may not have the Top Gun glamor of fighters, but they are still very demanding environments and the interior of a B-52 is not exactly Emirates First. Years ago I had a chance to talk to an F-18 pilot, who said that he and some of his squadron mates wore Citizen Skyhawks and they loved them but occasionally, the hands would become desynchronized during high-G maneuvers, necessitating a reset.
Who Wears What When?
Here we get into the always exciting realm of statistically insignificant but anecdotally interesting reportage, often on various internet forums and while it would be easy to make a sweeping generalization that not only do pilots not need a pilot’s watch anymore, they don’t wear them anymore either, the truth is, as is so often the case, more nuanced than that. For instance, on the Aviation Stack Exchange, there are comments from a wide range of pilots on what they do and don’t wear and what they do and don’t do with their pilot’s watches (a general background note is that pilots by and large are not investment bankers or crypto moguls and their watches tend to be at least reasonably affordable, and are also generally expected to work for a living).
One respondent wrote: “High end mechanical pilot’s watches are very little use in the cockpit whether you are in a commercial airplane or a Cessna 152. I love watches and I’ve searched for years for a watch that was a) very cool looking and b) actually useful when flying and I haven’t found one yet. They usually fail on b) because their analogue chronometer and/or timer functions are very hard to interpret, and cannot be read at night. The digital readouts on the analogue/digital types are often small and rarely have lights for night flying. Some have lights that will only work when in calendar mode, which is about as useful as a chocolate teapot. Often the functions are hard to use and require a fair amount of fiddling to get them to work, which is not good when you have a high workload.
“Commercial airplanes are usually so full of technology that a watch is completely redundant anyway, so for commercial pilots it’s a matter of style. I’m not a commercial pilot, I fly older light aircraft with less technology, so having a watch with timer and chrono functions is handy. For this I wear a Casio G-Shock as it has a large and easily readable face, a light activated by its own button, simple to use, and very rugged. Digital kitchen timers also work very well.”
Another weighed in, saying: “The consensus is basically a few things. First off pilots no longer make the kind of money the once did and Swiss watches have only shot up in price since say the 70’s. If you are talking about an entry level professional pilot making in the very low 5 figures the chances they are going out and buying a $5,000+ watch is low. Now let’s talk function. When you are in the cockpit a watch can be useful (provided you can read it). If your heading indicator fails you can use a watch and your turn coordinator to time your turns which can save your life in the clouds. I generally start my chronograph (Omega Speedmaster) when I take off, this gives me not only en route time but markers of the half hour blocks when I need to switch my tanks (on a Piper Warrior). For what its worth there is a clock in the plane as well as a timer so I don’t need a watch but I enjoy wearing one. When I fly dead reckoning I carry an all mechanical Heuer Stop watch to time my legs. Again these things are in the plane but I find the hand held stop watch easier to use. Some fancy aviation watches provide flight computers on the bezels like breitlings but there is no way you are reading that in the air unless its really smooth up there.”
One interesting point in the preceding comment, is that the pilot uses a Speedmaster as a pilot’s watch and of course, the Speedmaster was originally aimed, when it was launched in 1957, at car enthusiasts, not pilots. Some pilot’s watches are born, some achieve being a pilot’s watch, and some have being a pilot’s watch thrust upon them.
These are representative of a number of comments from pilots on various venues – there is by and large, no absolute necessity for a pilot’s watch, but they can provide useful backup functions and in some use cases, pilots actually prefer them for their ease of use under various circumstances. In general these are the exceptions to the rule that actual pilots generally see watches as redundant from a need standpoint, but it’s nice to know that there are folks out there who still find them an asset in the cockpit.
Perhaps this remark, from the Aviation Stack Exchange as well, sort of sums things up:
“I currently work as a corporate pilot. I have flown with hundreds and now verging on thousands of pilots – I have 5000 hours … and I can say that most guys fly with cheaper watches and if they choose an aviation specific watch, it’s typically a Citizen. I don’t think that they love them, but they are affordable and don’t break. I have one and am thoroughly tired of it, but it just wont give me an excuse to buy anything else.”
The 1916 Company is proud to be an authorized retailer for brands mentioned in this article, including Bremont, Cartier, IWC, Breitling, Tudor, and Omega.