Let's be honest: virtually no pilots actually use a mechanical watch for inflight navigation these days. Garmin long since won that battle, with the affordable D2 Air at the entry level and the MARQ Aviator at the high end.
That leaves mechanical watchmaking two further areas to explore: heritage and inspiration. Brands like Bell & Ross have aviation inspiration down to a fine art, and when it comes to aviation heritage, no one beats Breguet. So what’s left for the other brands? Reservoir has developed a unique response: the creative complication.
Airfight Chronograph
The young brand’s speciality, as we know, is retrograde displays. Not the traditional style familiar from Vacheron Constantin, but modern interpretations inspired by the gauges and dials found on the instrument panels of racing cars, submarines and, of course, planes. So that leaves us with one important question: how can Reservoir marry aviation and its traditional complication, the chronograph, with its own signature retrograde spirit? Answer: the Airfight Chronograph.
Double retrograde
Offered in a 43 mm steel or black PVD case, this new watch is a bi-retrograde chronograph. Its layout is uniquely faithful to the Reservoir spirit, and somewhat disorientating at first glance. The usual chronograph design cues are gone – reinvented through the brand’s retrograde approach.
The retrograde display is not single but double. The 0 to 30 scale on the left represents the seconds. The hand sweeps through 120° before snapping back to count off the next 30 seconds. On the right, the same 120° arc is divided into 31 for the date, and the hand only returns to the start once a month.
Both displays have four coloured zones: green, white, yellow and red. Reservoir can be forgiven for swapping the traditional aviation colour code for the more familiar automotive version. The standard order for an aircraft instrument panel is white, green, orange. Red does not exist as such. The three colour zones correspond to the speed ranges of certain flight operations (e.g. flap deployment among others).
Vertical bi-compax chronograph
The centre of the dial with its two subdials is dedicated to the chronograph function, making it officially a vertical bi-compax chronograph. The upper subdial counts up to 30 minutes and the lower one to 12 hours. The seconds are on the long second hand, alongside the standard hour/minute hands.
The aircraft-shaped counterweight on the seconds hand further strengthens the parallel with IWC. Indeed, the brand is known for its Pilot’s Watch collection, which also frequently offers vertical bi-compax chronographs. And many of its models (including the Top Gun) feature a plane-shaped counterweight on the running seconds hand. There’s no shame in emulating such a prestigious example, particularly since the rest of the Airfight Chronograph’s mechanical and aesthetic construction is highly original and creative – qualities that are all too rare in the aviation chronograph segment which frequently seems content merely to repeat itself.
