The Paris Air show is the world’s oldest and largest aeronautics trade convention. The most recent edition was held pre-coronavirus and hosted an estimated 3,450 journalists, 180,000 general visitors, and 142,000 professionals who inked over $140-billion worth of contracts, all in just five days.
I carried a roll full of pilots watches to the show in order to investigate the intersection of industrial design and the aeronautics industries, but after three scorched days of slipping through military-grade bureaucracies and, eventually, onto the planes I believed held my story, it became obvious that any substantive material relationship between planes and watches was largely long gone. However, now unbound by military specifications, watchmakers are free to create all sorts of compelling pilots watches that range from accurate recreations of historical references to dreamy luxury items.
Almost all modern pilots watches are meant for civilians. I asked over a dozen commercial and military pilots if they were issued watches, and every one of them politely smirked at what must have sounded like a naive question. When I posed this question to a US Air Force AH-64 Apache chopper pilot — an outgoing man in his 30s sporting full fatigues and polarized Oakley Blades who had logged over 2,000 hours of active duty flying in Afghanistan and Iraq — his response told me that I was bordering on disrespect. I might as well have asked him why he wasn’t wearing a shearling-lined bomber jacket and RayBan Aviators. Best not to romanticize these brave people and the life-and-death missions they carry out.
At one time, pilots required rugged and precise watches to fly, and many companies made both mil-spec pilots watches and cockpit instruments. But all that had died off by the mid-1980s as electronic navigation systems became the norm. What’s left of the relationship between horology and aeronautics today is a mutual nostalgic fascination with their former interdependence. For the mechanical watch industry, this fascination manifests itself as a celebration of an era when watches were cutting edge tools deployed in the world’s most important struggles toward modernity.
But only a fool would confuse a jewel for a tool, and it’s best to accept today’s pilot watches for what they are: incredibly rugged pieces of high-precision mechanical jewelry. (We could say the same of any modern tool watch category.) Of course, creating a great pilots watch today involves avant-garde materials and mechanical processes, but all that technology ultimately serves aesthetic ends.
Perhaps the greatest challenge for a designer is to create a pilots watch that carries the aesthetic of a specific plane or aeronautics company. This challenge involves exploring aeronautic symbols on a tiny scale. These symbols can range from suggestive combinations of colors and materials (Bremont excels at this) to imitating cockpit instruments (Bell & Ross’ stock in trade), and direct recreations of aviation branding symbols on the watch (Breitling has popularized these cross-brand collaborations).