What we are going to talk about here is a totally exact re-edition of a Breitling Navitimer from 1959. This isn't barely a fake watch with vintage cues or a design that was inspired by something from the past - it's pretty similar to a carbon copy. The design of the traditional Navitimer is bound to be familiar to many of the people reading this site. It's iconic among pilot's replica watches for its design, which combines a chronograph with a rotating slide rule bezel, a scale that can be used by pilots to manually compute various useful calculations for things like fuel consumption.
Details that can be traced to the original include the plexiglass crystal and continue right down to the number of beads found on the watch's beaded bezel. The exact number of these beads, which are there for easy gripping of the bezel and operation of the slide rule, varied considerably from reference to reference all the year around, with as many as 125 in the 1950s and as few as 93 in 1960.
The new movement Breitling replica has drawn on to power the Navitimer Re-Edition is the caliber B09, a hand wound COSC-rated chronograph. Since this is a re-edition of a replica watch that predates the advent of the automatic chronograph, a hand-wound in-house movement like this one seems like a logical choice, and actually this is a caliber that Breitling has made specifically to power the historically influenced re-edition.
It bears repeating that this new watch is practically a facsimile of the original from 1959. Actually, Breitling says that the only concessions to modernity that the current watch makes are its increased water resistance and the use of Superluminova in lieu of radium. The back of the replica watch is even closed, a period-correct connection to vintage watches that most companies can't resist breaking replica watches in the course of making vintage homages.
I've always been in love with the Navitimer. The dial, while undeniably busy, draws me in each time I encounter it, and I find myself wondering why I don't own one. This is an amazing modern take on a classic vintage watch, and I have to say that the popular replica Breitling will easily find homes for the 1,959 examples of the Re-Edition model that they are making. There's really nothing to complain about with regard to this watch, aside perhaps from the fact that it is essentially a reproduction of a product that already exists - but that's also the reason so many people are going to love it.
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