Timex Brings Pan Am Back With Two Waterbury GMTs, An Automatic And A Bomb Of A Quartz

Timex has been putting the Pan Am name on watches since 2022, mostly pilot’s watches that played up the aviation style. But Pan Am pilots weren't fighter pilots. They didn't need military-style pilot's watches. What they did need is a traveling pilot's watch. A GMT. And this is exactly what happened, since Pan Am crews were among the first to need one in the 1950s, and the airline’s link to the Rolex GMT-Master is a big part of why the complication exists at all. Now, Timex's homage to the iconic company gets two GMT watches, a new Waterbury Automatic GMT that looks just fine, and the quartz Waterbury GMT that looks much, much better.

Both are 41mm wide in steel, water resistant to 50 meters. The automatic has a rotating 24-hour bezel in blue and black and no crown guards. The quartz is brushed vertically and has the Pan Am globe on the crown. Both variants have a lug-to-lug of 48mm, with the quartz measuring 12mm thick and the automatic 13.5mm. Both of those numbers could be much smaller.

The automatic’s cream dial uses applied triangle, dot and bar markers, a lollipop seconds hand and a sword hour hand. The GMT hand has its arrow set toward the center, and the Pan Am logo is printed where 9 o’clock should be. The quartz has serif numerals on grainy white, a small sky-blue plane at 12, the logo above 6, and a 24-hour scale on a wide rehaut in black and sky blue, read by an orange GMT hand. Both have a date at 3.

The automatic uses the Seiko calibre NH34A, a caller-style GMT, so the 24-hour hand is the one you set with the crown. It beats at 3Hz with 41 hours of power reserve, visible through a caseback with the Pan Am logo printed over a Timex rotor. It comes on a steel H-link bracelet with a butterfly clasp. Timex doesn’t name the quartz movement. That one comes on a three-link steel bracelet.

The Pan Am x Timex Waterbury Automatic GMT is available now, priced at $669. The Pan Am x Timex Waterbury GMT is also available now for $349. See the automatic here and the quartz here.