Turbavykas wrote:
am surprised nobody it mention here but every second airline pilot I saw uses some version of citizen skyhawk
I also have one but I don’t wear it often as I find the writing too small to read. I am in my late 50s and I still remember when I could read it! 
I have to agree as a timepiece it keeps absolutely accurate time due to the radio link, and is phenomenal value for money compared to mechanical watches
However, I like mechanical watches and have a few from the usual Swiss companies.
what_next wrote:
It goes into the box with all the others and with a little luck in 50 years my son will be able to trade it for a castle in Ireland
Hmmm
I have a large Marklin collection, the earliest goes to 1935/6. So good that these things don’t eat.
I only have one watch, a steel Rolex Daytona, which I am wearing since many many years now and I’ll never get tired looking at it.
No pilot watch but I don’t need one. As we are producing Apps and all that stuff, I sincerely tried to get used to the Apple watch last year, but I gave up; too much hassle with charging. So, back to steam age.
Peter wrote:
BTW the Fortis gets through all the security scans.
One of the security screeners told me, that it’s not individual pieces of metal which trigger the alarm, but the combined amount of metal which must not exceed a certain mass. So if there is a belt, a brass nameplate on one’s shirt (that we as supposed to wear) and some metal in your shoes it can be the watch that makes the difference. And since it is the easiest to remove, I made a habit of getting it off every time.
This is the result and one of the reasons why I don’t wear a watch when I go flying. I dropped it from maybe one metre while getting it out of the tray. I wouldn’t care about the broken glass, but the mechanism is also kaput. Japanese junk. I liked this watch, self winding mechanical movement, very legible face, bright “superluminova” coating, the best antireflex glass I have seen in any watch – but Seiko is not selling spare parts and the cost of repair would exceed it’s value (less than 200 Euros).
And another Japanese one, from Citizen but quite different from the ones shown above. More a watch for a spaceship pilot (see my avatar picture 
).
The watch is called “Cosmosign Astrofantasy”, later models came by the name of “Astrodea” ( http://www.ablogtowatch.com/citizen-astrodea-stargazing-watch-collection/ ). It’s a mid 1980ies quartz movement which, beside the normal hands, drives a planisphere of the night sky in sideral time (a sideral day is about four minutes shorter than the usual solar day) always indicating the correct position of the stars. Using a loupe one can read, among many other things, the time of local sunrise and sunset to within 15 minutes or so, which could make it somewhat useful to a pilot. And of course, if one would navigate by celestial navigation…
And a few more… as I already had the camera on it’s tripod and one of the boxes with the watches was open, a few more that could qualify as “pilot watches” for an obscure reason:
A Swatch “It’s coming” from 1998. It has a calender with lunar phases on it’s bracelet which for cowards like myself might be useful for planning VFR night training missions. At full moon one can at least distiguish between forest and field in case of a forced landing. And for the lunar module pilot this Swatch came packed around a half-globe of the moon with something likr 15cm diameter. The scratches on the picture are on the plastic cover, not on the unworn watch:
Here is a very special one, maybe the only true pilot’s watch ever made. A wearable pocket calculator with watch and some very smart time functions, the Hewlett Packard HP-01 of 1977 ( http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/histnfacts/museum/personalsystems/0022/other/0022hpjournal.pdf ). The manual is full of examples how pilots can use this device. For example, one can enter the fuel on board into a register and the fuel flow into another one and start the stopwatch once airborne. The watch will then display the remaining fuel. From my calculator collector’s forum I know a Canadian B777 pilot who actually wears his at work. I never dared to do that for fear of getting it confiscated (" this sure looks like a remote bomb trigger device to me… "). Or losing it. The gold plated one in the picture is not so pretty, but I also have an unworn stainless steel one which must be worth more than my car and motorcyle together (I started collecting calculators 20 years ago when the prices were a little bit lower than today).
While we are at it, yet another Swatch, this one from the “Fun Boarder” series. For us pilots it has an altimeter with some memorizing capability so you can re-create your altitude profile at home. And for the skiing pilots it has the “snowpass” function which allows an in-built transponder chip to be programmed with the skilift-card data of some resorts:
For the “professional” (this is what it says on the dial) aviator, this Astroavia watch was designed. Not only does it have a very legible aviation style display, but also an integrated alarm because on work days we usually have to get up very early. Smart. I have yet to wear it for the first time and there is a high probability that this will never happen:
And, last for today, one of the first (or maybe the first?) smartwatches. An “I’m watch” from Italy. Lots of functions for the pilot – stopwatch, compass, weather, timezones, display of pictures and texts (checklists…) and many more. Unfortunately the company that made it was too early for the smartwatch hype and went bust in no time. As the watch can only be (re-)programmed through an app which is no longer available, all those fancy functions are lost in time like tears in the rain… I can not even set it to a different location for the weather display. What a shame, these things cost almost 500 Euros when they came out… Italian junk out of the textbook.
Nice specimen ;)
Flyer59 wrote:
The one and only … for me ;-)
For me too! Love the story around Buzz Aldrin’s vanished Speedy.
Was there a time when a “pilot watch” was a necessity?
You mean was it ever a required fashion? I think it still is, though there is also a big “anti fashion” movement in place, with pilots wearing the simplest watches.
Anyway, finally, this is what I have been wearing since summer 2014. No battery and has a stopwatch. Waterproof and never comes off. I bought it secondhand, refurbished, from a watch dealer in Italy.
