A big pilot, slightly reduced
By Julien Moreau, Geneva ยท
The Big Pilot was supposed to be big. That was the entire point. The 1940 original was 55 mm across, made for military aviators who wore it over a flight jacket, and when IWC revived the idea in 2002 at 46 mm, the size was the joke and the attraction at once.
So a 43 mm Big Pilot is a curious creature, rather like a small grand piano. IWC introduced it in 2021 and stripped it back to hours, minutes and seconds, no date and no power reserve indicator, around the 82100 with 60 hours. The conical crown and the triangle at twelve are all present, and it is water resistant to 100 m, which is more than the 46 can claim.
It is still 13.6 mm thick, and that is not a shirt-cuff watch whatever the boutique says. At ten to eleven thousand dollars it costs almost twice the Mark XX for an extra three millimetres of diameter and some extra bravado, which seems to me a poor exchange. For the man who loved the 46 and whose wrist politely refused it, though, this is the sensible compromise, and he should stop reading and go and try one on.