While Christopher Ward are one of the poster brands for British watch design (a founding member of the Alliance of British Watch and Clock Makers), it’s something of an open secret that most of their sales are actually overseas rather than here in blighty. Around 60% of their watches are sent across the Atlantic to new homes in America. In honour of this, they’ve released a special edition C60 GMT in partnership with one of the most famous American travel brands in history, Pan American World Airways (Pan Am). The limited edition is called the Christopher Ward C60 Clipper GMT.
Pan Am was once the last word in luxury air travel before its final flight in 1991, but much in the style of a revival watch brand, they are back in the skies as of 2025. Rather than being a commercial airline in the traditional sense, they are doubling down on their identity as a luxury air travel brand, offering dedicated tours and experiences curated to the traveller. The horological historians among us will also know that this is not the first (nor likely the last) time that Pan Am has been involved in the watch industry. The iconic Rolex GMT-Master [LINK TO: https://oracleoftime.com/history-of-the-gmt-complication/] was developed specifically for Pan Am pilots with the Pepsi colourway reflecting the brand’s signature colours.
Christopher Ward’s partnership with Pan Am is centred on their transatlantic flights from the mid-20th century. On October 26, 1958, Pan Am became the first airline to offer commercial jet-powered flights across the Atlantic in the Boeing 707 ‘Clipper America’, Which is where the C60 Clipper GMT gets its name from, as well as several other details. Specifically, it’s a limited edition of 707 pieces and the date wheel has a blue 26 numeral in celebration of that date.
But I’m getting ahead of myself a little. The watch is a 42mm GMT and worldtime model offering 300m water resistance in steel. It’s based on Christopher Ward’s Lightcatcher case, so it’s nice and sporty. It sits at a thickness of 12.45mm, so it has a fair bit of tool watch chunkiness when strapped to the wrist, but it’s by no means egregious. If you really wanted to, you could slip it under a cuff relatively comfortably.
One of the most significant aspects of the C60 Clipper GMT compared to the C60 Trident is the bezel. Instead of the normal uni-directional diving bezel, it’s a brand new 24-click bi-directional worldtimer bezel with aluminium insert. It features all 24 of the world’s time zones but rather than the normal list of cities seen on this style of bezel, it has 24 airport codes from those areas and which Pan Am planes flew to. The code for Key West in Florida, EYW, has been picked out in red as it was Pan Am’s original base of operations and where their first ever flight departed from. As an aside, the 24-click motion of the bezel gives it a very satisfying motion – clunky is the wrong word but it has more bite to it than a more traditional 60 or 120-click bezel.
For the dial, we are presented with an egg-shell base on top of which are the applied hour markers with old radium style Super-LumiNova for low light legibility. The seconds hand features a Clipper shaped counterbalance and there’s a Pan Am logo above the date window at six o’clock as an extra reminder of the collab. Around the edge of the display is the 24-hour rehaut in blue and red that pairs with the blue GMT hand to display multiple time zones at the same time.
With the screw-down crown in its second position you can rotate it one way to adjust the date and the other way to jump the GMT hand forward in intervals of an hour. This feature makes it what is known as a True GMT, as you can adjust local time and the GMT separately to make adjusting them easier. The movement that enables this is the Sellita SW330-2 GMT with 56-hour power reserve and +/-20 seconds per day accuracy. It’s protected by a solid steel caseback with the traditional Pan Am logo, which I have just learned is colloquially referred to as the “Blue Meatball” globe.
As already mentioned, the Christopher Ward C60 Clipper GMT is a limited edition of 707 pieces, priced at £1,450, or $1,950 since it is aimed at an American audience. It’s a fun watch for sure that plays on the nostalgic and, now that they’re back, not so nostalgic qualities of Pan Am. As someone who was born in a post-Pan Am world, I don’t have a particularly strong connection to this theme so it’s not a watch for me personally, but I appreciate the many small tributes that have been built into its DNA. It’s also tough to beat one of the most recognisable colour schemes in wristwatch history.
Price and Specs:
More details at Christopher Ward.
