I love single malts. My Friday and Saturday evenings stay kind of drenched in it but the once drink and puke bunch have turned sober, so the fun also watered down a great deal. For example, if someone banged his wrist on the wall out of spree and broke his digital Casio, it was fun. Today, if I break my Seiko Alarm Chronograph Flight Master Fliegerwatch, the same way, it won’t be.
Okay, I hear the question coming; the Fliegerwatch is a timepiece designed for pilots. Apart from ease of time-telling, it also puts some elbow grease for pilots. However, just because a watch has a slide rule, tells dual and world time and doubles up as a chronograph and a timer doesn’t make it a pilot’s watch per se. Bells and whistles look good, but doesn’t always are a part of the true thing. A commercial pilot may almost always not require something considered a must for fighters, so you got to decide beforehand if it’s a Citizen Promaster Skyhawk (radio-controlled) you are going to buy or a Seiko Flightmaster Pilot Slide Rule Chronograph. Features, functionalities, readability, accuracy, looks…all play vital parts in your selection. However, I humbly admit that being on ground you won’t find too many reasons to use them fully, but owning a classic Fliegerwatch can be a great deal of fun if you know how to pick one. A Flieger-look watch won’t do half as much. The triangle (pointing at/supplementing the 12 o’clock mark), numbers represented in other languages, or a high contrast for easy viewing) or the long, lume-d sweeping seconds-hand can easily be copied for the looks, but not the functions.
This is not to say Fliegers follow a definite formula; every watch manufacturer has his own interpretation of a Fliegerwatch. It’s very wrong to say this Tissot is a Flieger and that Citizen is not or the Seiko Chronograph Flight Master is a better Flieger than the Seiko Flight Alarm Chronograph. It all depends on what you want your watch to do; if it can’t, it’s not the best Flieger for you. But if you just want a Flieger lookalike, you’ll find plenty cheap stuff (for those marks and functions are never researched, or copied properly from bigger brands) serving as tasty eye-candies. Generic Flieger models – in polite words – are worth if you value just the image and not the core.
