LeCoultre A11 Mark VII "Weems" U.S. Army Air Corps Pilots Watch

In this age of global travel, it’s easy to take for granted the sight of contrails snaking across the sky. And yet, in the early years of the last century, airplanes were a new invention, and flight brought a new set of problems.  The romance was obvious—the logistics were terrifying. When you’re moving at speed through open air, any navigational error compounds fast. In fact, even being 30 seconds off in one's calculations could put a pilot off course by up to seven miles. Aeronautical navigation demanded specialized tools, and a new kind of timekeeper built not for the drawing room, but for the cockpit. Just as John Harrison did for sailors in the Age of Sail with his marine chronometer, so too did Captain Philip Van Horn Weems do for pilots. A native of landlocked Tennessee, Weems enrolled at just 19 at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, where he developed an obsession with celestial navigation. Despite the advances made between Harrison’s era and Weems’s, the tools used in navigation remained surprisingly primitive. Weems himself lamented that many navigators were still trained using tables and methods so complicated that few could even perform them correctly. In his words, “It may be remarked that there is no disgrace in being lost in the air...the important thing is to reduce the periods of being lost or uncertain of position to the lowest limit humanly possible.” In the late 1920s, he set out to do exactly that, starting with the watch that navigators used. Even with hacking seconds, synchronizing a watch precisely to a ship’s chronometer or a time signal was difficult. Weems’ solution was ingenious: a second-setting system using a movable bezel and seconds scale that could be aligned to a radio time signal, allowing a navigator to adjust for error in real time. As Weems put it, “Strange to say, keeping the watches running correctly is one of the most difficult matters in navigation.” He filed patents for what he called the Second-Setting Watch, and while the most famous civilian executions were made by Longines beginning in 1929, the concept ultimately became foundational to military navigation watches. This LeCoultre A11 Mark VII “Weems” is a direct result of his ingenious idea. Produced for the U.S. Army Air Corps in the 1940s, it is not a “pilot-style” watch in the modern sense. Rather is a true navigation instrument, built for synchronization, legibility, and function, issued with purpose and engraved accordingly. The 32mm stainless steel case features brushed and polished surfaces, a rotating second-setting bezel, and a snap-on caseback engraved starting with “PROPERTY U.S. ARMY A.C. WATCH, NAVIGATION, HACK, TYPE A” followed by its serial number, 74. The dial is exactly what you want in a wartime cockpit: a crisp white base, black 'Arabic' numerals with a red 12, a clear outer minute track, blued 'sword' hands, and a center-seconds hand. Inside beats a jeweled manual-wind movement, No. 124877, signed as expected. This is the kind of timepiece that reminds you that Jaeger-LeCoultre has always been about more than elegance and dress watches. At its core, it has also been a serious toolmaker, quietly helping write the history of aviation one synchronized second at a time. This spectacular piece comes from the collection of Zaf Basha, a noted authority on Jaeger-LeCoultre who has published two books: Vintage Military Watches: A Guide for the Collector and Jaeger-LeCoultre: The Ultimate Guide for the Collector. Over the years, Basha put together one of the most impressive assemblages of vintage JLC timepieces in the world, and we're thrilled and honor to offer many of them for sale on Analog:Shift.