Review: Breitling Navitimer B01 Chronograph 43

The Breitling Navitimer is an epic watch, period. It’s got its lovers and its haters for sure, but even its most diehard detractors have to at least acknowledge that, of all the famous chronograph wristwatches, this one is the absolute daddy. And now there’s a new one.

Background

Before there was the Rolex Daytona, before there was the Omega Speedmaster, there was the Breitling Navitimer. It is one of the greatest amalgamations of technology since the clock radio and has a legacy that spans almost three-quarters of a century. That’s why, to celebrate 70 years of the Navitimer, Breitling has unleashed a spectacular set of colourful editions that breathe a whole new life into the classic watch.

You don’t really hear so much about the Navitimer as you do those other two, however, the Daytona and Speedmaster, so why on Earth would it be worthy of the top spot? The Daytona is a watch that commands waiting lists longer than the dictionary and the Speedmaster kept Buzz Aldrin’s wrist warm when he became the second man to walk on the moon. By comparison, the Navitimer is just a portable eye exam.

Well, I told you the Navitimer has been around 70 years, and I have to apologise, because it’s kind of a lie. The Navitimer isn’t so much a new model in its own right as a variation of an existing model, the 1942 Chronomat. The Chronomat looks very different to the Navitimer today, but if you set them side by side back in the fifties you’d struggle to tell the difference.

The Chronomat, primarily, is a portmanteau. Breitling likes those. It’s also a computer, a smart watch with no battery if you like, that gave industry brainboxes a handy, portable tool with which to calculate complicated sums on the fly. It’s a chronograph for mathematicians. Chronomat. Now you know.

How it achieves this is with the slide rule. The slide rule is one of the many pleasures the older generations were able to enjoy in their schooling years, alongside canings, log tables and walking there and back again both ways uphill in the driving snow. The slide rule is a mechanical way to make what would be a tricky bit of mental arithmetic an absolute breeze, and old Willy Breitling had the wizard wheeze of adding one to his famed chronograph watches.

Well, I say a breeze—they’re still pretty tricky until you get the knack down. Even the original Breitling manuals described the slide rule bezel as requiring “a little time and patience to master.” For a clever clogs, however, the slide rule-chronograph combo was a masterstroke, and it wasn’t long before people who weren’t scientists, engineers and mathematicians but still needed to do complex sums on the go came a-knocking. These people were and still are the coolest people in the world: pilots.

It may seem like today’s pilots just hit the autopilot button, kick back and watch Netflix, but now, just like then, there’s a lot of work to do in the cabin to make sure the plane gets to where it’s going without having what is rather innocuously titled an airprox. To you and I that means getting pants-soilingly close to another pilot who’s also kicked back and watching Netflix.

There’s a constant mental load with real peaks at high stress moments and adding mental arithmetic into the mix would just be a disaster. So, instead of trying to do long division in their heads whilst trying not to wander into controlled airspace, a bunch of pilots got together and berated Willy Breitling into converting the Chronomat for aviation use.

Funnily enough, Willy was trying to shake off the brand’s association with aviation having become known just for making aircraft instruments and didn’t like the idea. The Chronomat was a sacred object that would net him a new market of professionals, but inevitably, whether it was the constant pestering or the wads of cash, he caved in and created a brand new portmanteau: Navitimer. A timer for navigation.

Review

That’s lovely and all, but to suggest the Navitimer is king biscuit in the presence of the Speedmaster and Daytona still seems a stretch. The Speedmaster went to space, remember? It did, in October 1962, the first of the Speedmasters to venture into low Earth orbit. It wasn’t the first wristwatch, however. A Heuer went up earlier in February of the same year, but that was a pocket watch worn on a custom strap. The first Swiss wristwatch to make it into space went in between in May, and it was—surprise—a Breitling Navitimer.

Like the Navitimer had been calibrated for pilots, this particular version was further calibrated for space. Rather than the standard twelve-hour display, it was upgraded to a twenty-four-hour one instead, because of course astronaut Scott Carpenter, who had commissioned the watch, deduced that flying around the Earth faster than the rising sun would make figuring out AM and PM a bit tricky.

And so the new watch was made, a watch for astronauts, and in a break In tradition, Breitling called it the Breitling Astronaut. Well, they did until one of Breitling’s lawyers leaned across and whispered that the term “astronaut” was protected copyright, and so they renamed it Cosmonaut instead. They were pretty sure the Russians would be chill about it.

And what about the Daytona? The Daytona is—well, it isn’t, really. In the company of a watch like the Navitimer it looks rather like a bit of an underachiever, with the biggest credit to its name being its gifting to a movie star who didn’t even bother keeping it, palming it off to whichever guy his daughter happened to be dating at the time. The only time the Daytona went to space was on the wrist of shuttle pilot Mike McCulley in 1989. By that point they were taking massive IMAX cameras up there with them, so hardly an accolade.

The fact of it is that the Navitimer is the original, is the chronograph that set the ball rolling for pilots of both the air and, erm, not air. So, to celebrate that achievement over 70 years of existence, we get this one, here in 43mm and packing the in-house Breitling calibre B01 to make it a not unreasonable 13.6mm thick. It stands out with a fetching blue dial with punchy black sub-dials, and you can choose green or copper too if you like, or a more traditional black or silver.

Little flecks of red remind you which way round the bezel goes when it’s at rest so you don’t have to stress about it being in the wrong place, and let’s face it, you won’t be using it to calculate anything anyway, unless you so happen to have a little time and patience and no iPhone.

But where the unremarkable spec is a little underwhelming, the quality of the thing takes over. Breitling has been pushing fine detail hard recently, with everything from the crispness of the details to the sparkle of the sunburst dial elevating its feeling of value higher than ever before. Even the view into the B01 in the back with some of the wheels and levers on show and the Breitling motif in the bi-folding clasp feel like a step up.

And that’s where this watch delivers in its most unexpected way, because with that increase in visual juice doesn’t come a ridiculous price. On leather—the right choice, if you ask me—it’s a shade under £7,000, almost half the price of its rival Daytona. It’s ahead of the Speedmaster by a cool £1,500, but a close study reveals an easy justification in the execution of that finer detail.

With only 30m of water-resistance, it misses out on the Daytona by quite some way; however, being a pilot’s watch, if you find yourself in the drink it’s all rather moot anyway. You will, like Scott Carpenter did when he ruined his Cosmonaute on splashdown, quickly realise you’ve got bigger problems.

For pretty much half the price, the Breitling Naivtimer B01 Chronograph 43 easily gives you twice the clout you’d get from a Rolex Daytona. It beat the Daytona into existence, into the air, into space. The movie stars that have worn the Navitimer may be on the opposite end of the cool scale but let’s just not think about that. The people who actually paid to wear one who really mattered are some of the coolest people on the planet—and that, by default, makes this one of the coolest watches, too.

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