Squint and it could be Schaffhausen
By Julien Moreau, Geneva ยท
Put a Spirit 40 beside an IWC Mark XX, take your glasses off, and tell me which is which. I have done this to friends. Results are not flattering to IWC's pricing department.
Longines has a better claim to aviation than most: it made the Hour Angle watch Charles Lindbergh devised in 1931, and the Spirit line, launched in 2020, leans on that history with some justification. This one is 40 mm of steel, black dial, steel bracelet, 100 m, and inside the L888.4 is a certified chronometer with 72 hours of reserve. At twenty-four hundred to twenty-seven hundred dollars that is a very serious specification.
The faults are modest. It is 12.6 mm thick, which is a touch chunky for 40 mm, and the dial has rather more printing on it than I would like. I would buy the Longines and spend the difference on a good leather strap and a long lunch, which probably says something unflattering about me, or about IWC.