Sean Lorentzen

When it comes to sheer function-first utility, few traditional timepiece categories can match pilot’s watches. Designed for the mission-critical environment of an aircraft cockpit, these watches are certainly ultra-legible, but the genre tends to create designs that are a bit, well, stark. Even brands that focus on more traditional pilot designs such as German marque Hanhart tend to create harsh, black-and-white presentations that perform well, but offer little in the way of nuance.

In the modern world of wearable tech and internet-enabled everything, there’s something genuinely comforting about the idea that some of the world’s most capable professionals still rely on a traditional mechanical watch in their work. The Italian Navy (or “Marina Militare” in Italian) is a textbook example of this, with an ongoing watch partnership with Italian-Swiss dive watch specialist Squale dating back to the 1980s.

Regular readers of this column might be feeling a touch of déjà vu here. This isn’t the first time I’ve covered a vintage Heuer Camaro in “Time Machines,” and it’s far from the first one that’s passed through my collection over the years. With that in mind, it’s the perfect opportunity to talk about one of the strangest phenomena in watch collecting: the on-again, off-again timepiece.