We’ve talked about a handful of Sopwith Watch Company’s Aero Marquis GMT watches and each one has an inspiring story attached to it. Their cases are made from reforged metal taken from vintage aircraft that connects each timepiece to a time and place in history. The Aero Marquis Nieuport 28 has perhaps one of the strongest provenances of them all, which aircraft historian and collector Fred Murrin explains in a fascinating video you can watch below.
The 41mm steel case is made from steel salvaged from the engine block, cylinders, pistons and connecting rods from a 1918 Gnome Monosoupape 9 Type N engine manufactured in France for use in the Nieuport 28 – the first fighter plane in the United States Air Service. The historic metal is reforged in-house at the Sopwith Foundry to ensure it’s up to modern standards of durability and resilience – part of which includes giving the case a titanium carbide coating to protect the metal.
It also has a rotating bronze bezel with a compass (AKA Azimuth) scale to help you navigate if you crash your plane in enemy territory. The use of bronze is a reference to the fact that vintage aviation instruments tended to be housed in bronze as well. Although the Nieuport 28 only had a single dashboard instrument, an altimeter, which is what the hour and minute hands are shaped after as opposed to the pencil hands on all the other Aero Marquis models.
Those hands point to an hour and minute scale presented in the sandwich style, where hour markers are cut out to reveal a layer of lume below for low-light legibility. Around the outer edge of that scale is a bronze coloured 24-hour scale that in conjunction that a central 24-hour arrow hand allows the watch to display the time in multiple time zones simultaneously.
The colour of the dial and bezel scale is taken from the paint scheme of the 95th Aero Squadron in World War I. It’s a light Camouflage Green colour that works nicely in combination with the bronze of the bezel and rich red-brown of the leather strap. That strap is also historically inspired by the leather grip-rails around the cockpit.
Inside the Aero Marquis Nieuport 28 is the ETA calibre 2893-A2 Élaboré with 42-hour power reserve. It’s a well-respected Swiss movement and as this is the Élaboré grade, it has an improved accuracy of +/- 7 seconds per day.
For price and availability, the Sopwith Watch Company Aero Marquis Nieuport 28 is $8,500 (approx. £6,400) in a limited edition of 98 watches. As with all Sopwith watches, the limited edition quantity comes from the number of watches they can physically produce using the historic metal, as once it’s gone it’s gone.
Price and Specs:
More details at Sopwith.
