Come fly with me

WE ask a Top Gun fighter pilot if pilot's watches are a mere cosmetic indulgence in today's technological age.

watch

WITH pilot's watches flying high, we ask a Top Gun fighter pilot if they are a mere cosmetic indulgence in today's technological age, or if a mechanical timepiece still has a role in aviation.

Pilot's watches are experiencing an incredible resurgence in popularity even if most people who wear them will never use them for their intended purpose, which goes well beyond just telling the time. In fact, the history of specific watches for pilots runs in tandem with the history of powered flight. In 1904 the Brazilian-born aviation pioneer, Alberto Santos-Dumont, asked his friend, the watchmaker Louis Cartier, to create a timepiece for him that he could read easily and without having to dig around in his pockets to find it.

Cartier, it is claimed, came up with the idea of strapping the watch to Santos-Dumont's wrist and thereby inventing the first men's wristwatch. (Patek Philippe had already invented it decades earlier, but Santos-Dumont played an important role in popularising its use by men. Before him they were generally worn only by women as an item of jewellery.) More than a century later, the Cartier Santos watch is still in production, although it is not often thought of as a true pilot's watch.

A pilot's watch needs to be legible with distinctive Arabic numerals (the Santos has a Roman numeral dial). It often has an oversized crown so that it can be wound or changed while wearing gloves and often an adjustable leather or canvas strap so that it can be worn on top of a pilot's clothing. From a functional point of view a pilot's watch is designed to withstand the G-forces it will be put through in flight as well as sudden drops in pressure. Today pilot's watches are produced by several watchmakers with an association with aviation including Breitling, Zenith, Bell & Ross, Bremont, Alpina and Omega. Perhaps the most significant new release of pilot's watches, however, is from IWC Schaffhausen which has 15 new models (IWC has been making pilot's watches since the 1930s).

A lot has changed since the introduction of powered flight. Technological advances in aircraft navigation systems have led to the idea that pilot's watches are worn only by men who, when they fly, do so in the comfort of a business-class seat. Given the number of pilot's watch models launched in recent months - not to mention the price tags of the watches - it's fair to say the notion is a true one: there can't be that many people learning to fly planes, after all. What's less true is that a pilot doesn't need a mechanical timepiece these days and can just rely on an aircraft's computer systems to fly. Here at WISH we still weren't convinced so we asked our friends at IWC to prove it. IWC, keen to take up the challenge, introduced us to Matt Hall. Hall is a third-generation pilot, a former RAAF fighter pilot (or Top Gun) and instructor. Before leaving the armed forces in 2009, Hall spent three years on an exchange program with the US Air Force flying more than 500 hours. Today he is a full-time race pilot and was the first Australian selected to compete in the Red Bull Air Race World Championships starting in 2009.

"For flying it all revolves around times and making sure you're in a strategic location ready for the mission at a particular time and making sure that when you do start the mission, it starts at the right time and doesn't go overtime," says Hall. "The accepted error of time in an aircraft is two minutes so you always have to be working within a two-minute timeframe, and we operate that to plus or minus five seconds for our bombing runs, so everything has to run to an exact timeframe to achieve those precise points in space. Technology certainly helps as it delivers time information in digital and graphic format which makes it a lot easier to get to your position but the thing is, if those systems fail you've still got to be able to complete your mission; you always have to have your analog back-up."

According to Hall, whose book The Sky Is Not The Limit about his life and experiences of flying was published by ABC Books last month, says a fighter pilot needs to be physically healthy, have good eyesight, reflexes and hand-eye co-ordination as well as being good with numbers. "You need to be intelligent with numbers because you are doing a lot of mental arithmetic around time, speed and distance, and if you don't have the mental ability to do that while you're flying the aircraft at 1000km per hour then you're not going to be a fighter pilot."

"Because of the importance of time to a pilot, the discipline that starts the day in a military flying situation is a time hack where everybody will look at their wristwatch and make sure that we all agree on the time to the second. And when you get into your aircraft you will compare your wristwatch to the aircraft [dial]," says Hall. That discipline, he says, is something that never leaves you. "Probably the most stress I've ever suffered is not actually racing planes and it's not getting shot at in a combat environment; it's feeling like I'm late for something."