Hands-On: The Bulova A-15 Pilot Watch

By Cole Pennington

In 1944, the United States Army Air Force Air Technical Service Command started testing the Bulova A-15 “Elapsed Time Watch.” The watch never moved out of the testing phase into large-scale production. But 76 years later, Bulova is giving that model a second lease on life by putting it into standard production. Some watches never see their day. This model just had to wait a while.


The original A-15 is one of the watches that could have been a horological hero. All the ingredients were there: a robust hacking movement, luminous markers, and an avant-garde system of two internal bezels that measured elapsed time, solving a very important problem for pilots at the time. The original watch was meant to make dead reckoning, an early form of navigation, easier. Measuring elapsed time in a more user-friendly fashion meant that pilots and navigators – and radio operators, even – could concentrate on other important tasks, like making sure ordnance is delivered where it needs to be or rescuing downed pilots. It also helped streamline the visual sweep of the flight instruments, ensuring pilots didn’t have to mark down time.

But for some reason or another, it never made it into standard production. It may have been the right watch at the wrong time, or perhaps budgets dried up. There’s little information about the fate of the watch. Records indicate that 500 were made, and they were delivered to a number of squadrons for testing, mostly in America. Units were also reportedly delivered throughout Asia in addition to England and Italy.


The modern A-15 functions in a similar fashion to the original, with a crown at two o’clock that operates the internal bezel measuring elapsed minutes, and the four o’clock crown recording either a second time zone or elapsed hours. Visually, the new watch incorporates a touch of color whereas the original was completely monochromatic. The 24-hour markers that flank the standard large Arabic 12-hour scale appear in yellow; it’s a pop of color that I think could have easily been used on the original design had it been put into production.


The case profile, at 42mm wide and 14mm tall, certainly lends itself to giving the watch a “modern” presence on the wrist. The original watch was based on the A-11, a time-only watch with no elapsed time …read more      

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