Pan Am folded in 1991, which has done nothing to diminish its cultural weight. The airline still stands for the golden age of American jet travel, and Timex has leaned on that association repeatedly in its ongoing Pan Am collaboration. The new Waterbury Automatic GMT is the best version yet, because for the first time the watch has a real reason to exist beyond the livery.
The reference point is unavoidable: the Rolex GMT-Master was developed in the early 1950s at Pan Am's request and issued to its crews. Timex walks the line carefully. The 41mm stainless steel case follows the GMT-Master's shape minus the crown guards, the two-tone 24-hour bezel uses the same visual language, and the applied triangle-dot-dash markers and lollipop seconds hand are direct quotes. The divergence is a sword-style hour hand, a nod to another school of pilot's watch, and a GMT hand whose arrow sits toward the centre of the hand rather than at its tip.
Inside is the decision that defines the watch. Timex uses Seiko's Caliber NH34A, an automatic with a caller-style GMT complication, meaning the GMT hand is set independently with the crown in the second position rather than the local hour hand. It beats at 3Hz with a 41-hour power reserve. For a traveller this is the friendlier of the two GMT architectures: you set the local time to wherever you land and read home time off the 24-hour scale without touching the movement's timekeeping reference. The cost is a shorter power reserve than the 70-hour movements now common at this price.
Rolex does not get an Oyster bracelet here. Timex fits a steel H-link bracelet with a butterfly clasp, prints the Pan Am logo at 9:00 in place of the marker, adds a date at 3:00, and decorates the exhibition caseback with a custom rotor. Water resistance is 50m, which is splash-proof and nothing more.
At $669 the comparison is a Seiko 5 Sports GMT at a third of the price or a microbrand GMT around $500. What the Pan Am buys is the dial design and the name on the caseback. For anyone who cares about aviation history rather than specifications, that is enough.