The Flying Officer

Thoughts from the week, in podcast conversation form.

Joel: The watch is quiet. Dark. Day and night, you don’t know the difference.

Joel: Every twelve hours, you set the clock. If it’s more than a second off, fast or slow, it’s out of spec. And you have to set all three clocks at once.

Paige: Three clocks, one second. I hear that and feel like it’s important. I suspect you’re going to tell me it didn’t feel that way.

Joel: You’re just setting the clock. It’s standard. Wherever we were in the world, we all had to agree on what time it was.

Joel: I was a nuclear weapons officer for twenty-one years. For two of them, I commanded one of America’s nine squadrons that keep nuclear missiles on alert and stand ready, day and night. You get used to thinking in a common reference time. Somebody you’re working with could be six time zones away from you, but you still need to know what time it is for both of you.

Paige: Zulu time.

Joel: Right. You’ll have flashbacks, stories that pop into your head whenever some random event happens. One of those that caught my attention this week was this new Gallet watch. The Flying Officer. It’s only been out a couple of weeks. I haven’t seen one in person and I don’t know that I ever will. I’ve been looking at pictures of the face.

Paige: It’s an old name. The first one came out in nineteen thirty-nine. Harry Truman wore one.

Joel: Is that right.

Joel: There are reference cities around the dial. It’s a twelve-hour face, but when everyone somewhere on the globe operates on a single reference time you’re thinking about a twenty-four-hour day and a twenty-four-hour globe, so two places can share an hour position, twelve hours apart.

Joel: London is the reference to start with. Move clockwise, or to the right on the watch face, and it’s like moving east around the globe. Geneva then Cape Town then Nairobi. Go the other way, west into the Atlantic, and you’ve got the Azores.