Flyback Chronographs

My favorite complication by far. Great for cooking.

Flyback? 🤔

Hit the chrono button on the top, let it run, hit the same button again it resets and.... AKA the flyback function.

I'm sure that was the main purpose of that functionality. Some people might have found secondary uses like timing race cars, but that's odd.

For this particular family of watches, the French Air Force specifically had a list of “must haves” for contractors to build to. These specs, contract, and ultimately watches became the Type XX. Many manufacturers over the years were suppliers to the French for these timepieces, Mathey Tissot, Airain, etc.

The fly back functionality was a required spec. Fly backs allow chronograph start-stop-reset and start with a single push of a button.

Breguet was/is the longest supplying and most prestigious brand manufacturing these watches. They offered civilian versions of these watches with slightly different specs over the years, resulting in Type XXI and TYPE XXII versions. These differences usually revolve around a third subdial, bicomompax was the military spec, and/or a date complication.

Hodinkee has a couple of great articles about these watches and their history.

Hit the chrono button on the top, let it run, hit the same button again it resets and.... AKA the flyback function.

Grail goals right there! Beautiful watch. I'm partial to the older Aeronavale 3800's.

It’s impressive engineering, which I love for its own sake.

But I don’t really get the use case scenario on a flyback 🤔

Is it that you ‘kind of’ see time elapsed, before the hand zaps back to 0.0 position?

Timing your kids fun is fine, but I’d think if I’m always missing the first elapsed time it’d be troublesome when I want to see precisely that first interval…?

Irrespective- lovely looking watch my friend 👍

EDIT : just saw below there is some old military spec reason for this function! I’ll research more myself!

It’s impressive engineering, which I love for its own sake.

But I don’t really get the use case scenario on a flyback 🤔

Is it that you ‘kind of’ see time elapsed, before the hand zaps back to 0.0 position?

Timing your kids fun is fine, but I’d think if I’m always missing the first elapsed time it’d be troublesome when I want to see precisely that first interval…?

Irrespective- lovely looking watch my friend 👍

EDIT : just saw below there is some old military spec reason for this function! I’ll research more myself!

I believe it helped with navigation as well. Fly at x speed on a specific heading for x minutes, hit the flyback button, then change your heading for x minutes, then drop your bombs. The stop, reset, restart of normal chronos could put you slightly off of the mark when you're traveling at higher speeds.

It’s impressive engineering, which I love for its own sake.

But I don’t really get the use case scenario on a flyback 🤔

Is it that you ‘kind of’ see time elapsed, before the hand zaps back to 0.0 position?

Timing your kids fun is fine, but I’d think if I’m always missing the first elapsed time it’d be troublesome when I want to see precisely that first interval…?

Irrespective- lovely looking watch my friend 👍

EDIT : just saw below there is some old military spec reason for this function! I’ll research more myself!

Very cool - puts you in the mindset of a nav guy on a 1940s bomber, shouting ‘mark!’.. and immediately timing again from a turn

I’ve got my grandfathers Waltham A4, a 1943 Navigators timer. It’s 144k bph escapement means it sounds like a cricket on meth when timing anything.

It’s designed to check ground speed: fly over a thing you know, hit stopwatch, fly over second landmark, stop timing. Known distance / elapsed time = ground speed.

Large hand is a quick moving 10 second timer, small dial counts 10 minutes. Useful for when you want to precisely time from 0 to 10 minutes, in the early 1940s

That is such a cool watch 🍻

I believe it helped with navigation as well. Fly at x speed on a specific heading for x minutes, hit the flyback button, then change your heading for x minutes, then drop your bombs. The stop, reset, restart of normal chronos could put you slightly off of the mark when you're traveling at higher speeds.

Very cool - puts you in the mindset of a nav guy on a 1940s bomber, shouting ‘mark!’.. and immediately timing again from a turn

I’ve got my grandfathers Waltham A4, a 1943 Navigators timer. It’s 144k bph escapement means it sounds like a cricket on meth when timing anything.

It’s designed to check ground speed: fly over a thing you know, hit stopwatch, fly over second landmark, stop timing. Known distance / elapsed time = ground speed.

Large hand is a quick moving 10 second timer, small dial counts 10 minutes. Useful for when you want to precisely time from 0 to 10 minutes, in the early 1940s

I was blown away by the XX in person. Such a nice watch, complete sleeper for me! Breguet always meant ‘dress watch’ to me before trying one of these on.

Flyback would be the way to go for me. You’ve chosen very well!