Bring This Watch Back: Breitling Chronoliner

Breitling is known historically for two specialties: chronographs and pilot’s watches. Despite the very real popularity of its Superocean dive watches, the legendary status of  high-tech “smart” models like the analog-digital Emergency, and the renewed dress-watch cred attained by the elegant Premier collection, it is the models most closely associated with both flying and timing — the Chronomat and Navitimer — that continue to best embody Breitling’s DNA, at least to most savvy enthusiasts. 

However, both the Chronomat and the Navitimer possess distinctive features that might be, for lack of a better descriptor, polarizing. The former has those angular rider tabs around the bezel and that big, bulbous crown; the latter sports that emblematic, circular slide-rule scale that dominates the dial, which looks cool yet busy and which few wearers actually know how to use. Both are luxurious, impeccably designed watches with sporty, tool-oriented origins rooted in aviation and navigation, but neither is really a gent’s dress chronograph in the traditional sense of the phrase. To be fair, Breitling does make a chronograph family that strives for both utility and elegance — that would be the previously mentioned Premier — but as it’s not aviation-minded in its aesthetic, it’s not “quintessential Breitling” for many folks. For a short while, however — from 2015 to around 2020 or so — Breitling made such a watch, even positioning it in the market as its “flight captain’s watch.”  It was called the Chronoliner, I was a big fan of it from the beginning, and still feel it could occupy a sweet spot in the current lineup —  if Breitling CEO Georges Kern would ever be inclined to bring it back.

The Chronoliner took many of its signature details from the 1950s and ‘60s, aka the “Golden Age of Commercial Aviation.” It was distinguished not only by its sleek, sporty-elegant look — with emblematic elements like a notched, bidirectional rotating bezel made from shiny high-tech ceramic and color-matched to the main dial, with its contrasting set of tricompax subdials  — but also by its combo of not one but both of the functions most useful to piloting: a chronograph and a GMT function. The former can be used to mark the time between legs of a flight, for example, while the latter can keep track of the time at a pilot’s starting point as well as his or her destination. In my recollection, the Chronoliner was the only Breitling watch model that offered both as part of its standard package. Most Navitimers and Chronomats are chronographs, of course, and there are several GMT-equipped line extensions of both, but in general the chronograph models and GMT models are separate from each other.

Like many Breitling watches of the era, the Chronoliner was fairly big — 46mm in diameter — and the model didn’t stay in production long enough to spin off additional smaller iterations, like the many that have since populated the Navitimer and Chronomat families. However, its size didn’t detract from its overall refined, sophisticated character, which was also aided by the dial’s clean, three-register aesthetic, usually executed in high-contrast “panda” style,” with simple baton hour indexes and a discreet date window (also color-matched) at 4:30. The watches also strove for retro stylishness in their “Milanese” mesh bracelets and the rubber straps that aped those bracelets’ texture. 

The first wave of Chronoliners was outfitted with Breitling Caliber 24, a self-winding, COSC-chronometer-certified movement based on the reliable ETA Valjoux 7750. Eventually, Breitling equipped the model with its in-house Caliber B04, based on the B01 that underpins all of Breitling’s manufacture movements. Its attributes, at least to Breitling fans, are well-known at this point: an integrated column-wheel chronograph accurate to ¼ second; a 70-hour power reserve, a COSC chronometer certification, and (in the B04 version) a GMT function that uses an arrow-tipped hand to indicate a second time zone on the bezel. In the Chronoliner, this movement is tucked behind a solid caseback relief-engraved with an image of two airplanes. 

A thorough perusal of Breitling current (and still relatively vast) collection reveals that the closest equivalent to the Chronoliner that’s actively being marketed — i.e., the only models equipped with the chronograph/GMT Caliber B04 — are the Super AVI models. Launched in 2021 and inspired by Breitling’s vintage 1953 “Co-Pilot’s Watch,” many of these are designed to pay tribute to famous historical warplanes, like the Curtiss Warhawk, the DeHavilland Mosquito, and the P51 Mustang. The Super AVI models are certainly nice watches in their own right — I am especially a fan of the olive-green-dialed Curtiss Warhawk edition — but they are, by design, much more military in styling, with big, stencil-type Arabic hour numerals rather than the Chronoliner’s more understated indexes; bold rectangular markers in the 3 o’clock subdials; bezels mostly in standard steel rather than dial-matching colored ceramic; and rugged-looking, stitched leather straps more suited for a ‘40s bombardier than a ‘50s Pan Am pilot.

Perhaps Breitling feels that it has all its pilot-watch bases covered by emblematic models like the Navitimer and Classic AVI (not to mention the revived Avenger series and the aforementioned Chronomat, which has really evolved into more of a general sport-luxury model than a pilot’s watch), and is filling the dress-chronograph niche with the Premier (and, in a somewhat quirkier vein, with the Top Time). Georges Kern, who took over Breitling just a few years after the Chronoliner’s launch, tends to know his audience, so the brand may well be right. But the Chronoliner combined some of the most appealing elements of both styles, and I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing this fondly remembered “flight captain’s watch” take to the skies again.

Bring This Watch Back is a series where we take a look at watches that deserve a second chance after being discontinued for one reason or another. Maybe they were ahead of their times or they fell out of favor due to outside factors. Here we make the case for our favorites, forgotten no longer.