Air’crafted elegance

When James Bond heads to Jamaica in the 007 film Dr No, it’s on a Pan Am Boeing 707. When Indiana Jones’s route is marked by a snaking red line, that’s a Pan Am Clipper he’s flying. And when Heywood Floyd is rushed to the moon to view an alien monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, it’s Pan Am’s ‘spaceplane’ he catches to get there.

From Catch Me if You Can to Flying Down to Rio, from Help! to Bullitt, when the movies wanted the glamour of the jet age, they turned to Pan American World Airways. There was a glamour to Pan Am – ‘the world’s most experienced airline’ – that few could match, America’s unofficial flag carrier for flying’s greatest decades. And, closer to home, Pan Am has serious watch-industry kudos too: the mid-’50s Rolex GMT-Master, which popularised the dual time zone watch, was developed in collaboration with the airline.

Meet Christopher Ward’s contribution to the myth: the C60 Clipper GMT, a limited run of 707 42mm GMT watches (see if you can guess how they picked the production number!) powered by Sellita’s SW330-2 and given world-timer functionality thanks to a bi-directional rotating bezel sporting destinations around the globe. It’s a handsome, dynamic piece that mixes modern quality and functionality with mid-century cool.

The story behind the C60 Clipper GMT begins with breakfast in New York – because of course it does – last spring. Christopher Ward co-founders Peter Ellis and Mike France were in town, and dining at the Balthazar restaurant on Spring Street with Mike Pearson, the company’s North America brand director. When conversation turned to Pan Am – which wound down its remaining flight routes in the late-2010s, but rumours had just started circulating that it might fly again – Mike P said: “And wouldn’t it make for an amazing GMT watch?” Well, there was no arguing with that.

“Pan Am’s look and feel was so considered and powerful that I almost got lost in it”

“It’s a no-brainer, isn't it?” says Mike France now. “And the watch we’ve come up with is so evocative of the ’60s jet age, the massive expansion of commercial travel – and the important role Pan Am played in all that. It’s easy to forget what an event long-distance air travel was back then, and how stylish and confident everything about Pan Am had to be. Of course, it didn’t hurt that the airline used some of the best design creatives of the age.”

Indeed, Pan Am’s one of those rare companies with not one but two iconic logos – the so-called ‘Blue Meatball’, a stylised globe usually seen on the tail fins – and the word mark itself, using ‘wind-swept’ capital letters in a strange but enticing serif font. Rich meat for Christopher Ward’s own designers to chew on, but – since any complete font from the period is lost to history – also responsible for a whole heap of headaches.

Taking lead on this project was a new face to Loupe, CW’s junior product designer Michele Pozzi, a young Milan  trained Italian. “Pan Am’s look and feel was so considered and powerful that I almost got lost in it,” he says. “I was researching their early days flying out of a Key West beach and the heyday of the Clipper flying boats just before the war.”

But even more inspiring to Michele was Pan Am’s ongoing wrestle with TWA for passengers across the Atlantic, and later role as spearhead of the jet age, flying Boeing 707s and Douglas DC-8s out of New York Idlewild. “They were the launch customers for the 747, and broke all sorts of ground in unexpected areas,” he says. “Their powerful computer reservation system, for instance, was so large it took up the entire fourth floor of their New York HQ, then the largest commercial office building in the world.”

Understated and lightweight, it’s for daily life – but more than happy to dress up for Oscar night, too.”

Quite the rabbit hole to burrow down, but there was always going to be one period this watch focussed on: the 1960s, when a succession of innovative Boeings enabled air travel’s peak period. “Once we’d settled on a concept,” Michele says, “my biggest job was fine-tuning the proportions and focusing on the detail, which involved choosing which airports to highlight on the bezel. Ideally, they’d all be ones Pan Am flew to, but – despite its globe-covering nature – that brought a few problems.”

Indeed, the first location to highlight wouldn’t be an actual airport at all, but rather their first base – that beach in Florida. “I cheated a bit using Dubai, as they only ever flew cargo there, while one of the last ones we picked was GOH for Greenland,” Michele says. Pan Am never operated a passenger service to Greenland, but in the 1930s the island formed part of its Arctic exploration programme as a potential refuelling stop. Those plans were scaled back as larger flying boats entered service before World War II, and abandoned altogether after the war with the arrival of long-range land-based airliners.

The watch itself revolves around a soft eggshell dial, with the word mark above 6 o’clock and the Blue Meatball taking pride of place on the closed caseback – “we tried it on the dial, but it was too cramped” – allowing Michele’s recreation of the Pan Am font to shine all around the bezel. “We were wary of going overboard with the vintage aspects,” he says. “This is the watch Christopher Ward might have made if we’d been around at the dawn of the jet age, and should be thought of as a contemporary rather than retro piece – while at the same time celebrating travel history.”

Further details include a little 707 counterbalance on the seconds hand, with that most vital of planes also referenced on the enclosed free cleaning cloth – which shows a blueprint diagram from a Pan Am flight manual – and, most unusually, on the secondary strap. All C60 Clipper GMTs come on a Bader bracelet, but included in the box is a woven alternative, inspired by the 707’s seat belts. “We wanted to use material from a real Boeing, but these have mostly perished or been scrapped,” Michele says. “So we worked with one of our suppliers to recreate it, incorporating the same faint vertical striping. It's a single pass strap, and having the buckle sewn in feels premium. Naturally, swapping between the two is easy.”

The end result, Mike says, is a lot of fun – but at the same time, a serious tool watch for a serious airline. “It’s beautiful, uplifting, and incredibly cool,” he says. “And also the first worldtimer we’ve had in the catalogue for a while – just the thing to get the year off to a flying start.” Oh, and Pan Am itself? Well, Pan Am Flight is on the relaunch case, so watch this space.