If she has come into quite a bit of money i would recommend a patek; its the only watch that will appreciate, will last a few lifetimes and are utterly gorgeous. As they say you never own a patek you are just the custodian for the next generation. Oh and the dial is simple, clear and none of that fangled quartz.

A watch for flying...
 

I use one of these. It's cheap. It's accurate. It's clear and quick to read. It's very light. You won't cry if you break/lose/drop/scratch it etc. and it's even got a light behind the dial.

PM

We have a thing over here called humour as well!

G

Seems like I'm the only one that is flying with a magnetic holder on my centre console, and a bit metal glued to the back of my I-phone........

I may not always have clean hands, but my wrists......are as clean as the pope's white dress!

###Ultra Long Hauler###

Over there humour is spelled wrongly - it's a cultural thang!

Ultra long hauler - I used to do the same until I discovered the discrepency between the standby and DI was caused by the tiny button magnet that barely gripped the 'fridge and not a dodgy gyro.

Sticky backed velcro is far better, IMHO.

Silvaire1 - that is a cracking bit of history you've picked up on; the revolutionary decimal time system from French revolutionary era. Didn't catch on. In an effort for universal disregard for the eternal enemy, please accept and use UTC as a poke in the eye to them!

And remember, UTC is referenced to Greewich, not Paris !

G

Yes, Greewich... in Lodon... Egland

:ok:

what fullwings says:
Casio G-Shock for me. Solar powered, radio time signal updating, light, comfy strap, UTC & local at the same time, wear it in the shower, survives a drop that you wouldn't. Time zone and daylight saving time is near automatic, and I like not having to open it, well hardly ever, to muck around with batts, and ALWAYS accurate to the second.

I think being solar, radio controlled and shock and waterproof ticks all boxes. Would prefer titanium because it does not react with my skin, but resin is more or less OK.

As agreed in Washington DC, 1884. Merde pour les Francais.

The well known Swiss aviation brand, that sponsors a certain wing walking team ahem.... I know only too well that they keep very poor time. Its a good excuse for being late though.

A functional clear watch will do all you need. If I wanted a fancy aviation watch I'd buy a Bremont. Very cool alternative to the herd.

Irish

Most mechanical ("automatic" i.e. self winding) watches keep poor time compared to even cheap quartz ones.

Yet people are happily paying fantastic prices for automatic "lifestyle" watches.

This one is quite nice though :) But this one would do... Or even this recently discontinued one (whose buttons are really horrible to operate).

Well, I'm still using a quartz Seiko that I bought on Masirah Island in 1975 and it has never let me down. I think it cost 27 dinars so it doesn't owe me very much!

Might want to get a proper hikers watch then, which includes an altimeter. That's arguably a more useful backup than a compass.

After all, has anybody ever experienced a failure of a magnetic compass? It's got exactly one moving part, suspended in some sort of fluid and it's not moving all that much to start with.

Forgive me for my cynicism, is it just me or are these so-called "pilot's watches" that cost the same as a 7 year old Ford Focus and yet do exactly the same job as a £19.99 Casio from Argos whilst covered in unintelligible numbers and other waffle/malaise merely for rich* posers?

They're expensive, big, hard to read and look daft. What's the point?

Doubting Smithy

*Or, alternately, heavily in debt posers living far beyond their means

Yes but if we all followed that logic in life then why buy a BMW/Audi/Jaguar etc etc when a Vauxhall Astra would do the same job for considerably less?

Sometimes, just sometimes in life do we not all aspire to owning something 'special' or just 'nice' just for the shear hell of it? And whats wrong with that? It would be a pretty dull life otherwise.

I'd like a Breitling and one day I just might buy one. Would that be a sensible choice? Of course not but I'd rather spend a couple of grand on one of them than having to buy years worth of nappies for a baby or a useless ring for some chick! :E

I'd rather spend 'a couple grand' on 20 hours airborne, or a new rating or part thereof - log book entries never break, faulter, reduce my 'street cred' or screw up my navigation timings! ;)

Thats why I havnt bought one yet!

I recently bought a Citizen Skyhawk AT keeps perfect time due to the radio signal, battery will last ages due to the solar poweredness of it, it tells me time in UTC and local at the same time, with hands and with numbers AND it's suitable for Scuba.

To top it all off, it fits my wrist perfectly.

I'm very happy and it didn't cost 13 grand!

my 2 pence worth.

For ALL inside the aircraft time related stuff I use a £2.99 digital stopwatch from Maplins. It has just 3 BIG buttons, large display digits, can be easily operated by touch, can display time of day, has stopwatch, timer and for nights away it has an alarm clock.

Nobody should be flying with their head inside the cockpit for the time it takes to do anything with their Citizen NightHawk. It is a two handed job with the watch off your wrist. I know, I wear one some days. It is great for timing the run and walk regime of my exercise programme as it beeps at the correct time. It is rubbish for reading the timer while running and tricky to do the same while walking.

I also have a couple of Breitling watches and a couple of Seiko watches, all have hands and are great for telling the time of DAY while flying or driving but not so good when light levels fall. They are NOT good for fumbling with while airborne.

As for having the time correct to within a fraction of a second, why? Give or take a minute or two is neither here nor there. If you really want to have the time to that precision then look to your GPS.

Rans6.....

All this talk about watches
 

Reminds me of an old story.
A woman gets assaulted on a dark night. When asked by the police if she could describe the attacker she replied "no, it was dark but he was definitely a pilot." When asked how she knew he was definitely a pilot she replied "he had a big watch and he talked about himself all the time!"

I use a couple of quid Maplin's stopwatch that dangles nicely off the yoke and a 6.85 Casio wristwatch from Amazon that loses about 3 seconds per month.

Mind you if they sold gold plated shoes somebody would buy them.

Backpacker I have had two failures of magnetic compasses.

Once the thing fell off its mount

And the second time the FO by accident belted it with a metal techlog folder and all the fluid pissed out.

And as for watches

I have a eco drive

Watch Details for GMT | Citizen Eco-Drive

Don't like metal straps
Like analog
like unclutered
Don't like gadgets whizz wheels etc.
GMT hand is a must.
And water proof for swimming pool and shower dunking

Can't be too expensive.

That one comes in for about 100 quid and is comfy decent glow in the dark dial jobs a goodun.

In how many hours, and how many backup systems came with the airplane? (I mean, if the FO came as standard with the airplane, I somehow assume it wasn't just day VFR equippped, right?)

How do you find a pilot among the people at a party?
You don't. He finds you.

A pilot goes on a date. Halfway through he says: "That's enough talking about planes. Now let's talk about me".

Any more?

The one that fell off was in a tommy. Which I have 1100 hours SEP. And wasn't really an issue as I was IFR well "I follow roads" and the A9 being the road in question. And the was zero backup apart from looking outthe window and speaking to ATC.

And in the one the FO killed 3400 hours but it is as much use as a chocolate fireguard because it gets calibrated with both generators off, windshield heating heat off etc. Which realistically would mean your into a double generator failure or god for bid a double engine failure. But there is no backup as such to it. It backs up two flux valves, gps, ATC. Its main use is for jamming charts behind it when your doing a LPC/OPC to cover up the windscreen for who ever is flying.

I bought a Breitling look a like in Dubai some years back cost £20 after a lot of haggling! looks the real deal and has got me into places I shouldn't have been since!! Easy to read and has all the fuel weight and other useful calculations on the back identical to the Breitling so excellent for W&B etc. Flight Computer on the front which is accurate and works well.

if it was the real thing would be terrified of losing or breaking it! If you ever go in for buying a fake make sure it's got a Japanese movement as these last for ever! The Chinese are the junk which goe's defunct after a week!

I Wear it every day and it is accurate to the second and has used only one battery in all the time I have had it. One of my better Aviation Buys!

Not interested in any social backlash from buying good quality fake goods!

There is a fantastic choice of fake watches at Corfu. All the names.

Most of them are not fully functional though. The small dials are mostly just printed on. But for a proper con-job you also need the uniform, surely?

I know a man who lives in Switzerland (so he must know everything about watches) and he tells me that most of the fancy watches (IWC, etc) use common movements. Not exactly Chinese ones, buy fairly normal Swiss made ones, with small modifications.

He also explained that it is really hard to get a mechanical watch to be accurate, because one has to make separate adjustments in different orientations, and each one needs to be verified for about a day.

I have gone for the tritium-illuminated watches lately because they glow nicely. I had this one for a while, then went to this one to get a date I could read ;) ;) The Seiko "pilot watch" was unreadable at night, a few hours after dark.

Another vote for the Traser/H3 watches here.
I've got the titanium version of the one peter has got. It is lighter than the steel version, and also seems to be virtually indestructable, based on the number of times I've accidentally smacked it into things.

And being quartz it is spot on. The "auto" watch was like all "auto" watches, including the 4- and 5-figure priced ones (according to reports) which tend to shift by ~ 1 minute every week or two, which is irritating.

However, I find the Traser/H3 stopwatch has "sticky" buttons and when flying holds (JAA IR training) it sometimes fails to start or stop, which is a PITA. I now use a big plastic digital stopwatch for that. But e.g. the £3500 IWC Aquatimer (which I never owned and would never pay that kind of money, but I looked at it at a few shops) has the same problem - fiddly buttons, which shows you can pay loads of money and still get a piece of junk which is not much good when you need it.

Oooh errr, a sticky PITA?

This is the exact reason why my wind up analogue stopwatch is worth its weight in gold. The big clunky button starts and stops the hands, the little clicky button zeros them. It takes nothing more fancy than that to sort out the carnage I've made of a hold or timed turn. ;)

Interesting. The buttons on mine have a very positive 'click', with no hint of stickiness or binding.
It sounds like yours might have a problem with the sealing o-rings, or perhaps they've changed the design. (Mine is about 4 yrs old now)

Every time a thread starts on watches, it always ends up 4-5 pages long.

We really don't do much to stop the stereotype :}

What is wrong with the timer on the adf console. I always use this for timed turns and holds.

This is despite having established having one on my wrist (local) and one glued to my clipboard (UTC).

Just thought I'd ask. :)

Also, FWIW, examiners can see the one on the adf console, but they can't see the one on your wrist.

I 'm a ppl student and have looked at many many watches also. To me, theres only 2 things you want to know - the actual present time (utc, of course) and how far into a particular leg of the trip you are.

At just over a hundred quid this is pretty good ...

RW2 Copilote Rallywatch


Or at half that price and the one i actually have ...


Apollogies for the massive links but that what was in the adress bar.

I can seriously recommend the timex as 1- i actually use it and it wokrs a treat and 2;
theres a massive button on the front of it that you just press at the appropriate "turn, time, talk" so no need to mess about holding buttons in while pressing another and hoping you've no just enterred some obscure function and then try for half an hour just to get the stopwatch back !

You can also switch off the digital display and it tries to look like a normal watch.

They missed a trick there - calling it the 'Copilot' will have lost them sales to the would be 'Pilot'.

rmcb, i think you're probably right. Aviation itself i believe was an after thought as its main reason for being is for rally co-drivers. The folks that designed it are exceptionally chuffed about it - i'd imagine by the multiple youtube videos they have of its different functions.

It is most certainly a functional watch but it is more like a stopwatch on your wrist - its massive.

Whilst various experienced people have said, quite rightly, that you don't need an expensive "pilot" watch for flying - equally most of us have the right to own, if we can afford it, "nice" stuff. Depending upon taste, that runs to cars, clothes, computers, aeroplanes.... .... and watches. I'll bet that just about everybody reading this has items which they spent more money on it because they like it, going well beyond the purely functional.

So, there is absolutely no reason why somebody who likes wearing a posh watch shouldn't spend a few hundred, or even a few thousand, on that watch.

If that person happens to be a pilot, then it makes sense for them to have a watch that they can use for flying as well - why on earth should you take the £500 watch off that you like wearing with a suit at work, to put on a £20 Casio to go flying?


Speaking for myself, I like my old RAF issue Seiko Military, which would probably cost around £150 to replace, and if it dies I'll probably spend that. I'm wearing it now in the office, and I almost invariably use it for flying. If for somebody else that's a £5k Breitling (or a middle-eastern copy of a £5k Breitling!), why the heck not?

G

GtE, I agree fully. Everybody is free to make their own lifestyle choices, including spending (too much) money on interesting hobbies, jewelery, gadgets etc. Heck, most of us on here spend several thousands each year on an entirely non-functional hobby. If all decisions were made rationally there would not be any Private Flying in Europe.

However the original question was not so much a "lifestyle" question, but a functional question on whether the built-in whizzwheel in a "pilots" watch was useful, etc.

And the overwhelming majority came up with a simple "no". Anything that tells you time to the nearest minute is good enough for PPL style flying. For CPL and/or IR you're going to need a stopwatch. Add big numbers and big knobs, plus a way of using it conveniently at night, and you've the ideal "functional" pilot watch.

(But you might not want to be seen wearing that in a suit...)

The analog watch I'm wearing when I'm wearing a suit works just fine for VFR flying. But when I'm diving, I'm replacing it with my diving watch. When I'm playing sports, I take it off altogether. And when I'm refereeing, I replace it with a cheap digital watch because I need an accurate stopwatch.

Different requirements; different watches. Why would you need one timepiece that does it all?

Each to his/her own - for one, I would prefer to spend this money on air hours. You don't look too much of a pillock when things go wrong.