IWC Pilot's Watch Chronograph Edition Antoine de Saint Exupéry Ref. IW387805

 

Image from The Aviation History On--Line Museum, from the article The Life and Times of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

 

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. For 2012, IWC has released a limited edition watch as a tribute to the French aviator, writer and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in the form of a Pilot’s Watch Chronograph. This is the sixth watch IWC has released in honor of Saint-Exupéry. As a writer he is best remembered for his novella The Little Prince.

 In 1921, Saint-Exupéry began his military service with the French Light Cavalry. While with the French Army, de Saint-Exupéry took private flying lessons. The following year he was offered a transfer from the French Army to the French Air Force. Saint-Exupéry received his wings after being posted to the 37th Fighter Regiment in Casablanca, Morocco. Later, he was transferred to the 34th Aviation Regiment at Le Bourget on the outskirts of Paris. His family objected to his flying after he had been injured in several air crashes. Saint-Exupéry left the French Air Force and tried several other jobs. Not finding satisfaction outside the aviation industry, in 1926, Saint-Exupéry began flying again in 1926.

Saint-Exupéry was one of the pioneers of international postal flight. He worked for Aéropostale between Toulouse and Dakar. In 1929, he was transferred to Argentina, where he was appointed director of the Aeroposta Argentina airline. He surveyed new air routes across South America, negotiated agreements and even occasionally flew the airmail as well as search missions looking for downed fliers. 

At the outbreak of World War II, Saint-Exupéry joined the French Air Force. After France's armistice with Germany in 1940, he went to the United States to convince its government to quickly enter the war against Nazi Germany. During the next 27-months Saint-Exupéry stayed in North America during which he wrote three of his most important works, including The Little Prince. In the spring of 1943, he left the United States to join Free French forces in Africa.

At this time Saint-Exupéry was 43 years old, eight years over the age limit for combat duty as a pilot. He petitioned exemption which was approved by General Dwight Eisenhower allowing to fly combat missions. However, Saint-Exupéry had been suffering pain and immobility due to his many previous crash injuries, to the extent that he could not dress himself in his own flight suit or even turn his head leftwards to check for enemy aircraft. Saint-Exupéry assigned to fly Lockheed P-38 Lightnings to fly reconnaissance missions.

On 31 July 1944, Saint-Exupéry took off in an unarmed P-38 mission from an airbase on Corsica. He did not return from the mission, dramatically vanishing without a trace. A French woman reported much later having watched a plane crash around noon near the Bay of Carqueiranne off Toulon. An unidentifiable body wearing French colors was found several days after his disappearance, east of the Frioul archipelago south of Marseille, and buried in Carqueiranne in September.

In September 1998 Jean-Claude Bianco, a fisherman, found, east of Riou Island, south of Marseille, a silver identity bracelet bearing the names of Saint-Exupéry and wife Consuelo. The recovery of this bracelet was an emotionally laden event in France where Saint-Exupéry had by then assumed the mantle of a national icon. Some disputed its authenticity as it was found far from his intended flight path, implying that the aircraft may not have been shot down. In May 2000 Luc Vanrell, a diver, found the partial remains of a P-38 Lightning spread over thousands of square metres of the seabed off the coast of Marseille, near to where the bracelet was previously found. The remnants of the aircraft were recovered only in October 2003. On April 2004, the French Ministry of Culture, the French Air Force and the French Underwater Archaeological Department confirmed that the remnants of the P-38 were, indeed from Saint-Exupéry's plane.

IWC Pilot's Watch Chronograph Edition Antoine de Saint Exupéry Ref. IW387805. The Ref. IW387805 is a mechanical chronograph watch. Its most interesting feature one the dial is totalizer at 12 o’clock. The totalizer is used by the stopwatch function to measure minutes and hours. Elapsed minutes and hours are recorded in the single sub-dial which houses two separate hands. There is a second sub-dial on the dial at the 6 o'clock which displays continuous seconds and has a date windows inside the sub-dial.

 

The chronograph movement, a IWC Calibre 89361, itself is special, featuring the flyback function. This allows you to stop, reset and restart the chronograph with the press of a single button. The movement is a automatics winding  movement which beats at the rate of 28,800 beats per hour and has a long 68 hour power reserve.

 

Befitting a limited edition watch, the case and clasp if the watch is made of 18-carat red gold. The dials is "tobacco" with sunburst pattern on it. Completing the package is brown calfskin strap with quilted stitching. The case is fairly large with a diameter of 43 mm.  The back of the watch is decorated with a engraving representing the last plane of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the Lightning P-38 and the date of his last flight July 31, 1944. 

 

 

Only 500 of these watches will be produced.

About IWC. IWC or the the "International Watch Co. Schaffhausen" was founded by an American engineer from Boston, Florentine Ariosto Jones, in Schaffhausen, Switzerland in the year 1868. IWC Schaffhausen is notable for being the only major Swiss watch factory located in eastern Switzerland, as the majority of the well-known Swiss watch manufacturers are located in western Switzerland.