Omega Flightmaster GMT Chronograph Jumbo Pilot “Hedgehopper”
Características: Modelo exposto no Omega Museum, em Bienne. Movimento também famoso, calibre 911, baseado no Lemania 861, suíço highgrade legendario. Grande, Clássico design 1970 Space age Haute Horlogerie (v. Informações adicionais); sofisticado. Excelente condiçao.
Caixa: Aço Inoxidável, grande aprox. 43x52mm sem coroa. Acabamento geral em otimo estado vintage. Coroa original assinada Omega; traseira com o Famoso avião DC-8 ainda visivel.
Fundo: Famoso dial (mostrador) em perfeita harmonia perfeita com a caixa, um dos destaques do modelo (otima legibilidade e fácil de operar); assinado OMEGA – Logo- flightmaster – T Swiss Made T; 7 ponteiros.
Comentários: Seminovo, charmoso vintage, emblematico. Revisado mecanicamente.
Acompanha : Caixa Vintage Omega, Documento do ultimo leilão (fatura official)
Condition Excellent (Worn with little to no signs of wear)
Scope of delivery original box, previous auction papers
Functions manual-wind chronograph, 60s, 30min, 12h, cam switched. Sub second. GMT dual time: 24h, set by pusher; f = 21600 A/h; power reserve 40h
Description
Historical pilot watch, stainless steel tonneau-shaped, manual-winding, chronograph with round button pushers and three registers. Excellent condition. Revised.
Bracelet Omega stainless steel signed ref 1162 endlinks 172. Modelo 145.026, n. 3.202.xxx.
All Signed, original, case, dial and movement. Still DC-8 airplane engraved on the Screwdown case.
Provenance: Traditional local auction house; It comes with original Omega case, and previous auction official invoice. Includes Operational instructions manual in pdf file.
Additional Information:
Omega has produced some lovely timepieces. They've manufactures some brilliant chronographs that have made horological history. But they also made some watches, like the Omega Flightmaster, that were designed with pure functionality in mind.
HISTORY OF THE FLIGHTMASTER
The Flightmaster line was introduced in 1969, and was the first Omega with a movement (Reference c.910) designed with the timing needs of pilots in mind. The first version of the watch replaced the running seconds sub-register typically found at 9 o’clock in chronographs with a AM/PM indicator (then replaced by a running seconds hand, is useful on a hand-wound watch since it let's you easily tell at a glance if it is wound and running.
letting the globe-hopping pilot track the time of day in his home city. Omega also added a rocket-shaped blue GMT hand for tracing the time in two separate time zones. The wearer was also given two methods of timing events: a 12-hour chronograph, as well as a 60-minute inner elapsed-time rotating bezel. That’s a hell of a lot of features in one watch!
The Omega Speedmaster was introduced in 1957 as a racing chronograph. Omega Speedmasters were discovered by professionals; the astronauts would wear their Speedmasters to the moon in the Apollo missions.How could Omega follow up on this success? In 1969, they released the Flightmaster. This was the first watch made by Omega to appeal specifically to pilots. It was a 43mm hunk of steel shaped into a futuristic styled case that looks like the intake of a jet engine.
For a complicated watch, the Flightmaster is easy to read, thanks to its brilliant information design. Two of its crowns and the pushers for the chronograph were color-coded to the function, leaving no guesswork in operation. The blue crown controls the auxiliary 12-hour hand, the black one rotates the internal bezel and the chronograph pushers are color coded half-red and yellow, to match either set of available hands. Just in case you forgot this was a pilot’s watch, there is a Douglas DC-8 engraved into the back…
Was the Flightmaster a success? They were awarded the government contract to provide watches for the X-33 program, King Hussein of Jordan owned a solid gold one, along with 200 other lucky and flush individuals. In the Apollo Soyuz mission, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov wore a Flightmaster 911… Also many commercial pilots used the Flightmaster in its time.
The 1970’s was a high water-mark for sport watches. Exuberant style, color and mechanical sophistication were the norm. In this rich environment, the Flightmaster stands out. It’s a big, funky complicated watch that you should have in your life. It’s a celebration of a time when air travel was cool and pilots were heroes.
Conclusion: the highly radical Flightmaster, a watch that, when it was introduced in 1969, was considered way ahead of its time. Maybe it still is….
The 1960’s undoubtedly were hugely important for the Swiss watch industry; this was a memorable decade for chronographs and the other “tool” watches. The watch became the symbol of the adventurous human spirit, being worn by drivers and their crews when they went racing; by pilots as they broke speed and altitude records; by international travelers as they crossed the time zones of the world; by divers doing underwater exploration; by the adventurers as they climbed the tallest peaks. Especially in the field of chronographs the competition was intense. Omega, Breitling and Heuer competed with each other. Omega introduced the Speedmaster in 1957. By the end of the next decade, the “Speedy” was worn on the moon. Breitling proclaimed that it was the world’s leading manufacturer of precision instruments for aviation, with the Navitimer and the Cosmonaute. Heuer was the most dominant brand in racing, offering chronographs dashboard instruments and stopwatches.
Indeed, “tool chronographs” seemed to be coming into their own in the early 1960’s, with the leading brands developing purpose-built chronographs for an increasingly wide variety of demanding applications. Omega introduced in its catalogue a weird looking object, with a highly distinctive over-sized case, 3 crowns, 2 pushers and 7 hands. This radical chronograph was the iconic Flightmaster. A bold product placement from a company that never stopped introducing weird looking but highly functional watches.
So, in the year that led the Speedy go down in history as perhaps the most iconic chronograph of them all, what made Omega design and sell the flightmaster? A watch that challenges the onlookers by its duality (highly radical but extremely functional).
The Flightmaster is a variant of the Speedmaster line; it was designed, engineered and marketed towards “pilots” by Omega from 1969 through the early 1970’s. Omega period literature referred to the Flightmaster as a ‘Pilot’s watch that has rather more than a revolving bezel,’ a statement which actually held the purpose of showing to the market the superiority of their model in relation to other popular GMT watches like the Rolex GMT or the Glycine Airman. In these the second hour hand was not independently adjusted, so in order for the operator to see the second time zone, he had to use the revolving bezel as well. The Flightmaster though, has a 12 Hour-GMT complication. The hand moves independently and is set through the auxiliary crown located at 10 o’clock on the case.
The first striking characteristic of the watch is its case. At first glance even these days it’s a big and hefty watch, and for 1969, it was considered monster sized. It is 52mm in length, 46mm with the crowns, 43mm without, and 15mm thick, while its weight was at 139 grams. Cut from a single block of Swedish stainless steel, the upper case was pressed and tempered sixteen times before it assumed its unique elliptical shape designed to fit the contours of the wrist comfortably. Although a huge watch for the standards of the day, the Flightmaster benefited from its hidden lugs. The designers at Omega wanted a chronograph that would be big in order for professional pilots to be able to check the time instantly. The result was that the watch shape and taper actually dominated the wrist while at the same time fit and blended perfectly, even better than many smaller watches. It is a common expression (among collectors) that ‘actually the Flightmaster wears smaller than its dimensions indicate.’
In its case back omega put the outline of a DC-8 super 61 jet. The chronograph incorporated a patented retaining crystal system and it was waterproof for 6 atmospheres. After the movement had been inserted into the case and the stainless steel back screwed into place, the tempered mineral glass crystal was sealed in position by a unique jointing system. The watch has been tested under space conditions and works even in a complete vacuum. Actually the Russian Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov wore an Omega Flightmaster (ST145.036) during training for his command of the first crew for the first joint Soviet-American space mission under the ASTP program (Apollo-Soyuz Test Project). During the second mission (17/7/75) that was under his command, the Soyuz spacecraft docked with the US Apollo spacecraft – the first docking ever between two spacecraft from two different countries.
The second striking characteristic of the watch was its dial. Although it seems quite overwhelming, the Flightmaster is one of the most legible and simple chronos ever devised. The flightmaster was the first model, which incorporated the colour-coded pushers. The auxiliary crowns on the left side of the case have a circular indentation in them and are colour-coded to their function… Blue for the second hour hand, black for the under-crystal bezel. In addition, the pushers on the right side of the watch also have indentations on them as well and have yellow/orange paint on them. These are colour-keyed to the sub-register hands that indicate chronograph elapsed time.
While under the shadow cast by the iconic Speedmaster, this watch has nonetheless played an important role for Omega by allowing the company to have a product in its catalogue that is specifically made for pilots -something to compete with Breitling’s Aerospace models. There have been two attempts/models that can be considered the spiritual offspring of the Flightmaster. The second attempt is much more recent and was promoted by Omega as the Z-33.
The Flightmaster is perhaps the ultimate pilot chronograph. Every part of the watch has been carefully considered and the chronograph born of the research design and development is a practical instrument – specially made for the pilot. True to its raison d’etre (producing chronograph tool watches), Omega never side-lined the construction and offering of more specialized tool chronos, and while all fall under the heavy shadow cast by the immortal Speedmaster, they nevertheless are truly unique. Perhaps the Flightmaster is the most exotic pilot chronograph of them all. Its size and overall design and surely the timing of its introduction make it a watch which even today never ceases to astonish watch connoisseurs.
