ZENTIH HAS CONTROL

15th May 2024

Captain of ‘Pilot’ as livery adorning any watch dial, Zenith has charted the skies since 1909 – continuing in magnificent fashion with an all-new fleet of flying machines. Words by Alex Doak.

Rolex may earn more PR points from its historic links to the Daily Mail – a 1926 ad celebrating its ambassador Mercedes Gleitz swimming the English Channel – but Zenith harbours its own vicarious Mail connection 17 years earlier. Surprisingly, also concerning the English Channel.

In 1909, the then-higher-regarded newspaper offered a £1,000 prize for the first man to fly the English Channel in a powered aircraft. That man was French inventor Louis Blériot and his own Type XI monoplane. After many failed attempts, earning him the plum nickname ‘king of wrecks’, he succeeded in becoming the first man to fly across La Manche that same year.

Landing on the White Cliffs of Dover after struggling through early-morning fog, the pioneering airman’s Zenith told him the flight had taken 36 minutes and 30 seconds. In a thank-you letter to the watchmaker of Le Locle in 1913, Blériot went on to recommend the quality of his Swiss timekeeper – high praise indeed, given his own precision-manufacturing nous, albeit at the aircraft-sized end of the scale.

“I am extremely satisfied with the Zenith watch, which I use regularly, and cannot recommend it highly enough to those in search of precision.”

Zenith’s pilot credentials were cemented, with a downwind fleet of sepia-tinted tributes and throwbacks over the ensuing years. But founder Georges Favre-Jacot was an innovator through and through, from founding an all-in-house manufacture in 1865 to equipping it with electric lighting – both unheard-of in the Swiss Jura back then – and having the foresight to register the trademark for ‘PILOTe’ and later ‘PILOT’ in 1888 and 1904.

So in keeping with Monsieur Favot-Jacot’s visionary spirit, 2023 finally sees an all-new, all-contemporary Pilot collection from Zenith with begoggled eyes set firmly on the horizon. No matter how keen your radar, it’s impossible to see where this bold bid for higher altitude will take the maverick brand, but it always pays to triangulate the course plotted thus far, airborne for a full century.

Chocks partez!

Zenith watches are available online and at ROX Glasgow.

1928

Special features
It features a coin-edge rotating bezel with a triangular ‘▽’ point and a protruding pocket watch-like crown that makes it easy to operate even with thick gloves. The large, fixed lug bar is another pre-requisite of the ‘Type 20’ standard procurement spec issued by the French air force at the time, seen elsewhere in Longines or Breguet’s archives, to name a couple. Re-released jn 2015, the ‘EXTRA SPECIAL’ label for the now-discontinued Type 20 core-catalogue collection is a nod to the original pilot pieces’ having ‘special’ on their dial, a minority with ‘extra special’. Horolo-historians still can’t discern any distinction beyond marketing, least of all in terms of the identical mechanics ticking precisely beneath… But who’s counting, eh?

1939

Cockpit fighting
With LVMH group’s finest watchmaker undergoing a ‘back to the roots’ reboot at the hands of charismatic CEO Jean-Frederic Dufour – long since at the helm of Rolex, no less – it was only a matter of time before the archives were raided and Zenith took to the skies once again. The talk of Baselworld trade fair in 2012 was undoubtedly the Pilot Montre d’Aéronef Type 20 – a near-comical 57.5 millimetres of wristworn tribute to a 1930-1940s hand-wound clock fitted into the instrument panels of many a French aircraft. Rather than a crown, the clock’s knurled bezel wound and set the watch. Meanwhile, 2012’s conversation piece justified its enormity with the 50mm movement inside, the calibre 5011K: designed in the late fifties as a competition chronometer, it was the most accurate movement ever tested by Neuchâtel’s observatory. And effectively brand-new having resided, unused, on stock shelves ever since. All 350 of them.

1968

Ciao, bella
The Cronometro TIPO CP-2 is affectionately referred to by collectors as the ‘Cairelli’, since it was issued for a decade to the Italian Army, who in turn commissioned not Zenith direct, rather the Roman dealership A. Cairelli. ‘CP’ stands for cronometro di polso, or ‘wrist chronometer’. The monochrome utility of its twin-subdial design takes you straight into the cockpit of an Aeritalia F-104 Starfighter, and ever since 2018’s re-release in ‘flyback’ guise, the 2,500 units produced by Zenith in the 1960s now fetch sky-high prices on the vintage market. Its hand-wound ‘calibre 146 DP’ chronograph movement was made by Zenith at the Martel Watch Co., which Zenith had acquired then used to develop the legendary, self-winding El Primero of 1969.

1972

Red herring / Red Baron
An oddball cult classic is Zenith’s Pilot/Diver, thanks to an unknown, vanishingly low-figure production ratio of the two variants’ respective bezels: a diver’s bezel with a 1-55 graduation and an aviator’s bezel with numerals 1 through 12. Pilot/Diver was introduced by Zenith in order to compete with the other well-known, high-class chronographs of the time, namely the Breitling Navitimer, various Heuers (Autavias and Carreras) and the Omega Speedmaster. Think of it as a strategic, far-sighted sports chronograph, neither fish nor fowl, but definitely fair game.

1997

Over the rainbow
In the mid-1990s, the French Air Force commissioned Zenith to deliver 1,000 watches for each of four years; chronographs fit for the extremes of a fighter jet cockpit, and therefore right up Zenith’s airstream. After the French elections at that time, the new government cancelled the project. Still dusting itself down from the Quartz Crisis, like all of its Swiss contemporaries, Zenith pivoted to Civvy Street, having developed and delivered six prptotypes already. The El Primero Rainbow Fly-Back Chronograph launched at the Baselworld to instant acclaim – huge for the time at 40mm, complete with military kudos and aeronautical sector colours to excite any aero-nerd worth their wings. Needless to say, collectors were dismayed not to see a 25th birthday revival last year… Wrists crossed for 2027!

2012

Flying past
Rather than a reissue, consider this a rose-red, rheumy-eyed, sepia-tinged ‘Now That’s What I Call Zenith Pilot’s Watches!’ greatest hits album – and how. At the time, it represented the best-value way into a brand-new, high-frequency El Primero chronograph from Zenith (under £6k, believe it or not) with all the retro, twin-counter monochrome cockpit motifs distilled down to Biggles-worthy raffishness. Streamlined six years later with 2018’s Cairelli reissue, the Pilot Big Date Special is essentially the latter, sans flyback function yet avec twin-digit date.

2023

Flying forward
Since 2012’s Big Date, it’s been wave after wave of Blériot-types. But Zenith has now laid firm foundations for a new era of magnificent, genuinely airworthy flying machines, sights set keenly on horizons both real or artificial. In the new Pilot Automatic and Pilot Big Date Flyback you certainly have all the requisite readability and utility of the latter cockpit fixture, their engines ticking over precisely to the beat of El Primero’s rocksolid 5Hz powertrain – timeworn for over half a century. With flyback functionality, ceramic case options, instant-switch straps and curvaceous restyling, the next-gen flyboys from Zenith are the stealth fighters to 1928’s biplanes. (The ‘rainbow’ colour pops hopefully enough to sate Zenith nerds till 2027 at least…)

CONTINUE READING

It’s that time of year again! The world’s watch industry gathers for its annual outing in Geneva to launch its novelties at Watches and Wonders.

It’s never a better time to treat yourself or a loved one, whether it’s a gift, or simply because… well, why not?