180 YEARS OF
180 YEARS OF
180 YEARS OF
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AVIATION | Longines Twenty-Four Hours<br />
58 | WatchTime LONGINES SPECIAL<br />
ON A SINGLE DIAL<br />
In the 1950s, Longines<br />
created a special watch for<br />
the navigators of Swissair.<br />
ese days, on-board ight computers calculate the path<br />
from one place to the next. ey get their information<br />
from the Global Positioning System (GPS), from various<br />
radio beacons on the ground and from the Inertial Navigation<br />
System (INS). Together these systems supply the<br />
Flight Management Computer (FMS) with all the necessary<br />
data required to calculate the correct ight path.<br />
Before departure the entire route is entered directly into<br />
the FMS or sent via laptop. e two-man crew can then<br />
concentrate on their duties during the ight and y the<br />
airplane or simply check the controls, depending on the<br />
segment of the ight. Exact time in the cockpit these<br />
days is supplied by the GPS and an independent digital<br />
clock. And the pilots of the military forces always wear a<br />
specic type of watch during dicult missions to serve<br />
as an additional backup if necessary.<br />
Like its predecessor:<br />
The new Longines<br />
Twenty-Four Hours<br />
also has an onion<br />
crown and a<br />
central seconds<br />
hand (far left).<br />
The hinged back of<br />
the replica model<br />
covers the automatic<br />
Cal. L704.3.<br />
Many years ago cockpits looked very dierent than<br />
they do today. In the absence of today’s powerful computers,<br />
work in the cockpit was distributed among three<br />
people: the captain, the copilot, and the navigator who<br />
sat behind the two pilots in an area full of displays and<br />
controls. e duty of the navigator was, as the name indicates,<br />
to navigate. He was also a kind of on-board technician<br />
who monitored many of the systems that are now<br />
controlled by computers. e navigator also ensured<br />
that fuel was pumped from one tank to another for optimized<br />
trim of the airplane. e navigator was primarily<br />
concerned with ight preparation and execution. He<br />
calculated and continuously checked the course of the<br />
airplane with all his various tools and instruments and<br />
he collected any available data from radio beacons and<br />
navigational aids on the ground.<br />
During a long-distance ight an airplane may y<br />
through numerous time zones whose times dier from<br />
the UTC. e standard time must, therefore, be the same<br />
in every cockpit. Earlier GMT (Greenwich Mean Time)<br />
was the standard time; today it is UTC (Universal Time<br />
Coordinated) in both air and sea travel. ere is also no<br />
dierence between civilian and military time. Both base<br />
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