Blancier makes handmade watches to order. You go on their cool flash builder and you select a case, movement, face, and strap. Your piece is then hand-assembled and engraved. I have one and it’s quite striking. Well, now they have a pilot’s model with large, luminous numbers and a bright hands. It comes in 42mm or monstrous 55mm models. This model looks great on a leather strap in steel and costs about $1,000, depending on your choice of movement and case. This stuff is truly one-of-a-kind, so it makes that whole “a grand for a watch” thing go down a bit easier.










The Blancier site drives me loopy.
Buy American:
http://www.rgmwatches.com/
I must say I never understood the concept of a “pilot watch”. I mean, aren’t you supposed to look at the road/sky/dashboard/anything but your wrist whilst piloting?
Most modern cockpit panels built after about WWII have some sort of timekeeping mechanism built into them. I worked as a professional pilot for years using a Casio digital watch similar to the Casio LA670WA-1. $24.95 + tax out the door. I would actually use it in the cockpit too. When asked when we were going to arrive, I would look at the GPS, look at my Casio, do a little math and say “Um, about 6″. We were hardcore about timekeeping, I can tell you. It was all we could do to keep from taking porn-shots of our watches on our wrists in the cockpit. We were manly timekeeping men, the lot of us.