Traditionally, for us over here at the WRB, October has always been a hectic month. We have logistics issues to deal with for our WATCHPOD accessories brand, and we usually have an influx of watches to review as well. Add a couple seasonal viruses into the mix, as well as an increase in topics to cover on my columns over at Forbes and Worn & Wound – we now have ourselves a perfect storm of slow-downs when it comes to covering our in-depth watch reviews here on the WRB.
I’m happy to announce that I have been enjoying a new watch for the last couple of weeks despite all the craziness, and that happens to be the Timex X Pan Am collaboration watch in fly back form. Now, don’t get too excited, “fly back” is a big term to throw around in the watch industry and the one we have here from Timex is of course going to be quartz powered.
Quick Touch on the Fly Back Term
A fly back does one thing only, but it’s incredibly useful and pretty revolutionary for all chronograph movements. It essentially saves the user time when operating the chronograph function of a watch by allowing you to click only once to start the chronograph and once to reset it. Even my Rolex Daytona doesn’t have this special function, the Daytona and every other normal chronograph requires you to push the top pusher to start and stop the chronograph timing, and then lastly push the bottom pusher to reset it. The fly back function skips all of these steps and creates a seamless and extra quick user experience – excellent for on-the-fly timing.
Design and Heritage
One of the main attractions about this watch has to do with its Pan Am partnership. Most people already know about the iconic Pan Am airlines story, and timex has created this watch as way to pay tribute to those glorious times back in the 1970’s and 1980’s. This era inspired watch does have some symbolic design cues from this period, most obvious being its overall retro chronograph appearance with pump pushers. The dial is also quite emblematic with the Pan Am Logo situated at the 10 o’clock position and its really neat but slightly over complex bezel.
Keep in mind that this is a quartz watch, and with that brings some positive aspects such as its light weight due to lack of mechanical movement, as well as a touch more design freedom which can sometimes be constrained on mechanical watches for engineering reasons.
Although the watch is quartz powered, at 43mm it isn’t small by any means, and I feel Timex could have paid more attention to the proportions. They do offer a GMT variant of the new Pan Am collaboration that comes in at an excellent 39mm in size – so if you have small wrists such as myself you may want to veer more towards that variant.
If your wrists are anything larger than 6.5 inches the one we’re reviewing here today could be a great choice for you. Compared to the other versions offered by Timex this Fly Back Chronograph offers more stylistic creativity on its dial with the addition of fan shaped sub dials, retrograde hands, and a cool airplane shaped seconds hand in bright orange. Dial designs like this are very rare to come by on affordable mechanical watches, this presents a great chance to add some unique dial flair to the collection.
Final Thoughts
While I think Timex created a nice Pan Am inspired watch, the sizing of this particular version leaves a little to be desired, and it’s slightly large for me to wear as a daily. I do appreciate the deep blue sunburst finish of the dial and all its rather rare complications, including the ability to track a second time zone while simultaneously being a highly accurate quartz powered chronograph. Perhaps I’m overly invested in the dreamy world of mechanical watches, but I do think that if you’re in search of a vintage inspired quartz chronograph packed with useful features this could be a nice pickup for you.
Raymond Moody says
One thing was missing in your review, The PRICE!!
Thank you