On Nov 14, 11:51 pm, Jay Honeck wrote:
http://tinyurl.com/37qd8w

For those who may be in the market for a decent pilot watch, this
Timex Expedition is the best one I could find with all the features I
wanted, for a reasonable ($54) price.

It's got dual (actually triple) time with Zulu time accessible at the
push of a button, countdown and -up timers, several reminder alarms, a
built-in digital compass (that actually seems to work), and it's all
easily readable with my old(er) eyes.

The buttons are big, and the menu system is more intuitive than my
previous watch, which was also a Timex Expedition (but a different
model/version). It's pure digital, rather than analog/digital like I
wanted, but I discovered that if I wanted Zulu time easily accessible
without screwing up the date, pure digital was the only option.

I looked at every pilot's watch out there, up to and including the
Citizen, Torgoen, and all the other "hot shot pilot" watches, and IMHO
they all suck. What blew me away was how you could easily spend as
much as $5K on a watch that was absollutely not usable for telling
time! To me, that's just an IQ test waiting to be failed...

For $54, this relatively simple watch has every feature (well, except
for an altimeter) that a pilot could want, a comfortable band, and it
even looks decent. Best of all, I can buy roughly 100 of these watches
for the cost of a single "real" pilot's watch!

I use a $35 Timex expedition indiglo analog watch with absolutely no
features except a second hand.

My GPS396, which I use in the cockpit, is programmed to show zulu time
in one of the data fields that is always displayed on the map page, so
that's where I get zulu time in the cockpit. When I do duats, etc
briefings I ask for and get local time. When I use the WSI weather
satellite in my flying club, it displays current zulu time at the
bottom of every window.

I went through the whole pilot watch thing a couple of years ago and
finally settled on a Torgoen zulu time watch, one of the low-end ones
that was basically just an analog watch with an extra hand for zulu
time, but it didn't even last a year -- soon the zulu hand was losing
about 1 hour a week, unacceptable. Also, while the design was elegant
in my view, it was harder than I liked to decipher zulu time in real
time. So now I just use my simple and cheap Timex analog watch and
when I need zulu time in the cockpit, I just look at my GPS.

Your watch is a a nice one, but I don't like button pushing on my
watch in the cockpit.

I agree that E6B and other featureitis watches are a joke. The only
pilots I know who wear them got them as gifts from non-pilot loved
ones.