IWC's New Watch Was Made for a Very Special Round-the-World Flight

When the single-seat Supermarine Spitfire fighter was at the peak of its operations during World War II, it had a maximum operating radius of some 450 miles. Today, from the aérodrome at the center of the Goodwood Estate, a rebuilt Spit from 1943 stripped of its paint and polished to a mirror-like finish, set off on a new sortie that will take it on a
The Silver Spitfire is the brainchild of two pilots based at Goodwood’s Boultbee Flight Academy which restores Spits and offers flight training to pilots and joyrides to fans of these unique and iconic aircraft. Steve Boultbee Brooks and Matt Jones, both experienced spitfire pilots, are sharing the trip in collaboration with IWC watches, a pre-eminent specialist in aviation timepieces, whose relationship with pilots predates even the Spitfire itself.
In 1948 IWC delivered its made-to-order Mark 11 pilot watch to the RAF, founding a whole family of robust functional tool watches still in production today and that for much of its history has shared the name Spitfire. In early 2019 IWC launched its Year of the Spitfire, and a whole new generation of Spitfire watches inspired by the original Mark 11.

Boultbee and Jones will both wear a brand new “Pilot’s Watch Timezoner Spitfire 'The Longest Flight',” whose time can be adjusted with a simple twist of the bezel to each new timezone, itself a technological challenge. Complicated as such
The Silver Spitfire’s challenge is to negotiate—in roughly
This story originally appeared on Esquire.com. Minor edits have been made by the Esquiremag.ph editors.