Pilot Watches

Potentially detrimental to your watch’s accuracy, magnetism can be a big problem for pilots. To overcome this, some watches such as the Bremont MBI II encase the movement in a soft-iron Faraday cage which routes any potentially damaging magnetism around the movement.

A function which enables you to instantly reset and restart the chronograph, this is an extremely practical function for a pilot, especially during a series of timed aerobatic manoeuvres which follow on immediately from one another. It also plays an important role in military aviation, as it allows the pilot to read the timing for two consecutive events simultaneously.

In the time before the widespread availability of modern calculation devices, navigational calculations were performed with a slide rule. Originally popularised by Breitling on it s 1952 Navitimer, the miniature rotary slide rule is probably the feature most readily associated with pilot watches and is capable of making all the calculations necessary for in-flight navigation.

A useful function if flying long distances, a GMT watch is designed to show two timezones simultaneously.

GMT (which stands for Greenwich Mean Time) is the zero point on the 24 hours scale of international timezones. From here, all other timezones are either plus or minus GMT.

Your GMT watch can be set to both the local and GMT time, which will then enable you to calculate the time anywhere in the world by simply adding or subtracting the right number of hours. If your watch has a GMT bezel, you can also use this to track a third timezone.