This new Pan-Am pilot’s watch wants to party like it’s 1959

Pan-Am Airways has been out of business for 35 years, but its stenciled logo and serifed font nonetheless remain potent symbols of golden-era air travel in all its martini-soaked glory. The mid-century logo design, affectionately dubbed ‘the blue meatball’, was synonymous with sophistication, experience, and the sort of excess you’d find at a Sterling Cooper office Christmas party. At its height, Pan-Am served 87 countries on every continent bar Antarctica, and while it’s best-known for its role ushering in the jet age, it’s also closely linked to the development of the GMT watch.

This week, British watchmaker Christopher Ward becomes the latest to tap into this rich heritage with the launch of the C60 Clipper GMT. A 707-piece limited edition, the 42mm stainless steel dual time-zone model embraces the airline’s signature blue and ‘motion-blur’ font on its aluminium bezel, with the iconic stylized globe engraved into the watch’s case back.

Powered by a Swiss-made Sellita automatic movement, the Clipper C60 takes its name from Pan-Am’s tradition of including ‘Clipper’ in its aircraft’s names—a nod to its origins operating in the Caribbean and Latin America with a fleet of seaplanes. The watch’s bezel is detailed with official IATA airport codes (an organization Pan-Am co-founded) with red text reserved for Key West, Florida (EYS), the location of the airline’s debut flight.

​Priced at $1,995, the C60 Clipper GMT comes with a textile strap made from the same material as passenger jet seatbelts—a detail that aviation geeks will surely appreciate. Likewise, fans of pilot’s watches will appreciate Pan-Am’s connection to the advent of the GMT watch.

​After the world was officially divided into timezones at a conference in Washington DC in 1884, watchmakers quickly developed pocket watches capable of displaying the time around the world. It would be almost 70 years, however, before the GMT came along. Specifically, it was Pan-Am, which operated the first transatlantic jet-powered passenger services, that commissioned Rolex to come up with a watch for its pilots to use as they criss-crossed the globe. “Jet lag” was a newly-discovered and little-understood phenomenon, and it was rather charmingly supposed that a watch capable of displaying two time zones at once might help trick the pilots’ circadian rhythms into ignoring the effects of high-speed travel. That proved beyond the powers of even Switzerland’s most famous watchmaker, but the red-and-blue split for night and day passed into horological design history and remains the go-to motif for GMTs the world over.

​To date, at least four watch brands have partnered with Pan-Am. Breitling produced a Pan-Am Navitimer in 2019, as part of a tribute to significant airlines, and the affordable independent brands D1 Milano and Nezumi have both also produced Pan-Am models. Most recently, Timex has produced a series of Pan-Am watches paying tribute to its heyday. If you were wondering how they, or Christopher Ward, can partner with a company that hasn’t operated a flight since 1991, that’s because Pan-Am is in the midst of a comeback, sort of.

​Since 2024, the Pan-Am name has been revived under the auspices of a multi-platform luxury enterprise that includes vacation packages, private aviation logistics, and hospitality. The company has operated a Pan-Am themed dining experience in California since 2014, and is working with Hilton to open a Pan-Am hotel in 2026. It may not run a fleet of jumbo jets or own a Manhattan skyscraper, but as Christopher Ward’s new GMT and several other popular recent collabs suggest, the Pan-Am name still has plenty of gas in the tank.