Hands-On The Breitling Navitimer Super 8 Watch Revierws

To indulge in a feeble joke, making watches based on instruments that were used by belligerents in a major war is always going to be something of a minefield. War is something everyone deplores and yet not only do we seem to keep getting into them, we also celebrate many aspects of war; it brings out both the very best and the very worst in human nature. Watches and clocks are as essential to the waging of war as they are to making peacetime a well-regulated and profitable enterprise, and participate in the dual character of military conflict. Such instruments, made for war, make it much easier for us to do each other in efficiently, which is rather ghastly, but as is so often the case with precision instruments made to serve a specific, critical purpose, they also, you know, look cool.

Which brings us to the Breitling Navitimer Super 8 replica watch. The raison d'être of this watch is to pay homage to a Breitling timing device made for the purpose of raining down death from above upon one's foes: the ref. 637 stopwatch. This particular reference was made in several different versions, and specifically for bombardiers – as the advert says, "stopwatch for bombardment planes."

You'll notice that the advertisement also mentions "with backwards running," and according to Breitling: The Book these stopwatches could be used for either elapsed interval timing, or as countdown stopwatches. The latter was essential for accurate bombing runs. Precision high altitude bombing was a critical competency for both sides during World War II and enormous effort went into developing bombsights capable of a high degree of accuracy, against both stationary and moving targets. Many bombsights required the bombardier to look up the time it would take for a bomb to fall to earth from a given altitude, input the time into the stopwatch, and when the timer – used in conjunction with a bombsight – ran out, the bombsight's crosshairs would be placed at the correct "range angle" which was used to determine how far away from the target the bombs needed to be dropped.

Later in the war, bombsights like America's top-secret, gyro-stabilized Norden would completely computerize the process, making lookup tables and the use of countdown stopwatches unnecessary.

I've always felt that if you're a potential customer for this kind of watch, you know it, and if you're not, well by golly you know that too. This is not a mass-appeal timepiece, nor is it meant to be; complaining that it's impractically large is sort of like being upset with a Mercedes G-Wagon SUV for not being a Prius. Sure, it's lighter on the wrist than you'd expect from its appearance – the case for the green dial version is titanium (there is a black-dialed version as well, with a steel case) – but that's almost irrelevant; this watch is all about duplicating the almost brutalist heft and stolidly purpose-driven design of the original, not providing slip-under-the-cuff, pairs-with-a-suit-or-jeans versatility.

In terms of fidelity to the original, one quite nice feature of the Super 8 is the seconds hand, which duplicates the anachronistically ornate center hand of one of the original 637 models.


The ref. 637 was one of those mechanical devices that inherited a design language that didn't necessarily see ornamentation and precision as mutually exclusive and I'd actually have loved to see the font of the numerals on the original reproduced as well. However, it's probably insufficiently hairy-chested for modern tastes and the dial design in the Super 8 does connect with the rest of the new Navitimer collection.

If you're wondering how it pairs with a jacket and button-down shirt, it doesn't. However, rules were made to be broken – if you're one of the Gianni Agnellis of the world (the late Fiat boss was famous for wearing his watches on the outside of his shirt cuff) maybe you can get away with it. It takes a certain confident disregard for other people's opinions to pull off that degree of transgressiveness, but as Melville wrote, "everyone knows that in most people’s estimation, to do anything coolly is to do it genteelly." Jump into your favorite Charvet shirt and Rubinacci blazer strap on this Jolly Green Giant, and go paint the town pink – if you can.

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