The Rise and Fall of Breitling: How Aviation's Favourite Watch Lost Its Way — Then Found It Again

It is October nineteen fifty eight. Pan American World Airways inaugurates the first transatlantic Boeing 707 service. The dashboard in front of the pilot contains Breitling instruments. On the pilot's wrist sits a forty one millimetre steel chronograph with a circular slide rule bezel, oversized Arabic numerals coated in luminescent radium, and a small set of wings on the dial reading AOPA. The watch is called the Navitimer. Reference 806. Commissioned six years earlier by the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, the largest pilots' club in the world, and built to perform every calculation a pilot needs in flight. Average speed. Distance travelled. Fuel consumption. Rate of climb. Conversion between statute miles, kilometres, and nautical miles. The dashboard and the wrist run on the same brand. Every long haul cockpit of the late nineteen fifties contains a Breitling instrument. Every serious captain crossing the Atlantic wears a Breitling watch. This is aviation's favourite watch. Not by marketing. By commission. The Royal Air Force asked for it. The American pilots asked for it. The Italian Air Force will ask for it. Every Breitling that matters exists because a working pilot picked up a phone. The man who answered those calls is named Willy Breitling. He runs the company his grandfather Léon founded seventy four years earlier, in eighteen eighty four. He is the third generation. He will be the last of the bloodline to run it. In twenty one years he will sell the rights to the names Breitling and Navitimer for a fraction of what they are worth, weeks before he dies, because the empire built on professional commissions has collapsed underneath him. To understand why, we go back to Saint-Imier.