Page 56 - Sharp Summer 2021

WATCHES
The Big Pilot Soars Again
How IWC invented (and reinvented) the modern pilot’s watch
AT THIS SPRING’S WATCHES
& Wonders Geneva, the
year’s biggest launchpad for Switzerland’s latest and greatest
new watches, IWC dropped a quiet bombshell. In addition to a dozen new versions of their pilot’s watches — including a new perpetual calendar
and a Top Gun edition in sand-coloured ceramic — the 153-year-old watchmaker revealed another new model unlike anything else in its collection.
The Big Pilot’s Watch Shock Absorber XPL is the product of eight years
of research and development at the brand’s Schaffhausen R&D lab, and it looks every bit like the technological marvel it is. Featuring a movement suspended on a cantilevered spring and components crafted from a metallic glass alloy, it is said to be able to withstand accelerations over 30,000 g's. While the average watch-wearer
is unlikely to have occasion to test this (roller coasters top out at about five g's, for reference), extreme g-forces
are something military aircraft pilots contend with as part of their jobs. IWC knows this, of course, because it has
spent the past eight decades imagining, designing, and building some of the best aviation watches in the world. The new Big Pilot’s Watch Shock Absorber XPL is the latest example.
“I think pilot’s watches speak about a certain form-follows-function ideal,” says IWC CEO Christoph Grainger- Herr. “It’s quite a pure design, by defi- nition. And I think it’s a nice balance between elegance and ruggedness.” This balance is at the heart of IWC’s Pilot’s Watch collection, which com- bines historic design with 21st-century innovation. You can see this is as much in the Big Pilot’s Watch Shock Absorber XPL as in the new Big Pilot’s Watch 43, a watch that would be recognizable to any WW2 pilot yet retains an undenia- bly modern feel in its details.
IWC produced its first pilot’s watch in 1936, at the dawn of the modern aviation era. The Special Pilot’s Watch was equipped with an anti-magnetic movement and shatterproof glass, and could keep accurate time at temper- atures down to -40°C — an essential advantage in the freezing cockpits of the day. Within a few years, the design
had advanced significantly, and by the late 1940s, IWC would establish the look and feel of aviation watches as we know them today. With its sans serif numerals, big luminescent markers, and a triangle flanked by two dots at 12 o’clock (which makes it easier for pilots to read the time at a glance), the Navigator’s Wristwatch Mark 11 IWC designed for the U.K.’s Royal Air Force in 1948 would become the inspira- tion for countless pilot’s watches that would follow.
Over the next 80 years, IWC contin- ued to refine aviation watch technology, forging cases out of new materials like ceramic and adding high-end compli- cations like constant-force tourbillons and double chronographs. The thing that stands out most about IWC’s pilot’s watches, however, is just how consist- ent their design language is — and how little it has changed since the dawn of aviation. It’s a look that continues to resonate far beyond the airfield. “The vast majority of applications for these watches is not inside the cockpit,” says Grainger-Herr. “But at the heart of it, it is still the tool that it’s supposed to be.”
56 SHARPMAGAZINE.COM SUMMER 2021
by JEREMY FREED
Credit