Who Watches the Watchmen (Our Chit Chat Thread)

Funny enough IP I've never seen one of those pilot watch designs with a cylinder movement. All lever movements. The case dial and hands would have been of good quality and the "precision" on the dial would suggest well, some precision when new, so maybe the movement was replaced later alright. Maybe with your digging you might find out what the original movement might have been and source one. Movements tend to be cheap unless they're "big names" and even then...

The joke is that if you look at pilots from that era wearing wristwatches a goodly proportion, if not the majority are wearing nondescript pieces, often Tank style "dress watches" which were popular then. In any event as far as military pilots anyway for the most part it was navigators who needed more specialised timing. Take IWC's series of "Big Pilots" watches, they're a modern reissue(in much smaller dimensions) of a Luftwaffe design for navigators not pilots.

Some pilots did wear specific watches alright, the guys and gals who were flying alone for example and needed them for dead reckoning, or the Longines Weems hour angle method using radio timing and were almost always private purchases. Sometimes Air Force units would buy them privately, especially German one before the cat was out of the bag re their rearmament as precision timepieces were on the list of verboten military items for Germany. My Zenith of the same layout as your Technos was one such unit purchase. A dive bomber unit in that case. Another example would be the German fighter units at the start of WW2 who bought Hanhart and other chronographs at unit level, apparently because in the Battle of Britain they used the timing function to keep an eye on the time and how much fuel they had left to scurry back to France as their loiter time over England was short, like half an hour in many cases. Ignore that and they'd be learning the breast stroke in the English Channel. Even at that stage and in those scenarios with radio comms general timing was a mic button click away. Almost all bomber and fighter type and civilian aircraft had built in clocks/timers. EG this Heinkel 111* where it's on the control yoke itself on the left.






*though that layout suggests it's a later post war Spanish built under licence Casa. If you ever watch the 60's Battle of Britain film, the Heinkel bombers were Casas. The ME109's were also the Spanish Buchon built versions, with *gasp* Rolls Royce Merlin engines. At the time there were no airworthy original engined 109's around.