Like many other famous tool watches, the Breitling Navitimer was the product of a specific request or problem: In this case, the US Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) approached company scion Willy Breitling and asked him for a unique chronograph for its members. The oversized 41 mm wristwatch that he delivered would come to define the pilot’s watch genre for generations: Offering 30-minute, 12-hour, and running-seconds registers in a tripe-subdial format, the Navitimer’s dial was printed with the logarithmic slide rule scales, and paired with a rotating bezel. Using this unique combination of features, pilots could compute air speed, fuel consumption, distance traveled, unit conversions, and more, all while measuring elapsed time with a convenient, luminous, wrist-worn instrument.
Courtesy of Phillips
While the original 1952 Navitimer was only available to AOPA members, subsequent versions of the watch were made commercially available from 1956 onward and given the reference 806. A myriad of successor versions followed from the early 1960s onward, including “panda" dial versions with white subdials; “twin-jet" logo versions with serrated (rather than beaded) bezels; automatic versions; oversized 48 mm versions with date windows; and more. (These days, it can be had in standard vintage-inspired versions, dainty time-only versions, wildly complicated versions in precious metals, and everything in between.) Seen on the wrists of jazz great Miles Davis, Formula 1 legend Jim Clark, and Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter, the Navitimer is a veritable legend of tool watchdom and remains required wearing for any serious collector.
From the article by Allen Farmelo, Paige Reddinger, Victoria Gomelsky, Oren Hartov, Blake Buettner
