Breitling Navitimer: the slide-rule chronograph

The Navitimer is the Breitling that most buyers meet first, and it is also the one they most often misread. A slide rule on a bezel, a chronograph under it, and a seventy-year paper trail of variants mean that two watches with the same name can be a decade apart in design and a world apart in value. This reference guide sets out what the Navitimer is, how its dial and bezel work, and how a buyer checks a used example before money changes hands.

Breitling SA was founded in 1884 in Saint-Imier by Léon Breitling, and the company is now based in Grenchen with production in La Chaux-de-Fonds. The story matters here because the Navitimer is one line inside a wider catalogue that also holds the SuperOcean, the Chronomat and the Emergency, and that history shapes which spare parts exist and which do not. Anyone weighing a Navitimer against its stablemates can start with Breitling on the used market, where the rest of the family sits in context. What follows stays with the Navitimer itself, and with the Breitling Navitimer checks a buyer can actually run on a watch in hand.

01Where the slide rule came from

In the 1940s, Breitling added a circular slide rule to the bezel of its Chronomat models. That bezel is the feature most associated with the Navitimer, which launched in 1954. The name is a contraction of two words used to describe its purpose: navigation and timer. In the 1950s and 1960s, a version was offered by the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association with the AOPA logo on the dial, which is one of the reasons dial variants from that era differ so visibly from one another.

The aviation framing deserves a plain word. The Wikipedia page on Breitling notes that aviation functions are offered largely as novelty complications, since such functionality has been replaced by modern electronic instruments and electronic flight bags. That is not a criticism of the watch; it is the honest context in which a slide rule bezel is bought today. You are buying a calculating instrument that was once a working tool, and the design language that came with it.

02Why the bezel is the first thing to inspect

The rotating bezel carries a fixed scale on the dial behind it, and the two work together as a slide rule for multiplication, division, speed and distance. Because the bezel is the part of the watch that a pilot would actually turn, it is also the part that wears first. On a used example, the questions to ask are mechanical rather than cosmetic: does the bezel rotate smoothly through its full travel, does it stop where it should, and does the scale still line up with the fixed scale on the dial? A bezel that is stiff, loose or slightly off-centre changes how the watch reads and can be an expensive part to correct.

Alignment is the detail that separates a good example from a merely tidy one. Look at the numerals on the bezel against the markers on the dial at several positions, not just one. A bezel refinished or replaced in the past may sit perfectly at twelve but drift noticeably at four or eight. If the seller cannot say whether the bezel is original, that is information in itself.

03Reading the chronograph dial

The Navitimer is a chronograph in the literal sense of the Wikipedia entry on the type: a stopwatch combined with a standard watch. A basic chronograph carries hour and minute hands on the main dial, a small seconds hand to show that the watch is running, and a seconds hand on the main dial, usually with a sweeping movement, alongside a minutes sub dial for the stopwatch and often a third sub dial for elapsed hours. The stopwatch starts, stops and resets to zero using pushers placed next to the crown.

On the wrist, that means you check more than one hand. Start the chronograph, let it run for a minute, stop it, read the minutes sub dial, and reset. Then repeat. A hand that returns to zero slightly off, a sub dial that lags, or a pusher that feels spongy are all faults you can find in a shop without opening the case. The same discipline applies when a Navitimer is being weighed against the chronograph most buyers already know, which is why Omega Speedmaster the details is a useful comparison for anyone deciding which stopwatch layout suits them.

04Which era of Navitimer are you looking at?

The Navitimer has been made across very different periods of the company's ownership, and that is the single most useful thing to establish before you look at condition. Breitling passed from Léon Breitling to his son Gaston in 1914, and to his grandson Willy in 1935. Willy's children were not interested in the family business, and the Breitling factory in La Chaux-de-Fonds closed in December 1978. Willy, already in poor health, died in May 1979. Ernest Schneider bought the Breitling name from the founding family in 1979; he owned Sicura in Grenchen, and production moved to the Sicura factory, which was later renamed Montres Breitling AG and then Breitling AG in 1994.

The Schneider family retained ownership until April 2017, when Theodore Schneider sold an 80 per cent majority stake to CVC Capital Partners for $870 million. He kept 20 per cent until November 2018, when he sold the remainder to CVC. On 23 December 2022, Partners Group took over the majority of the shares from CVC, and its co-founder Alfred Gantner took the presidency of the board. Georges Kern is chief executive. Each of those handovers marks a period in which Navitimer cases, dials and movements were sourced and finished differently.

05What movement should be inside?

Historically, Breitling sourced movements from suppliers such as Valjoux, ETA and Venus rather than producing them in-house. In 2009 the company developed the B01, a self-winding column wheel chronograph movement, used in the Chronomat 01 and the Navitimer 01. The Chronomat's own history gives the date the B01 line settled: the current Chronomat, released in 2009, was the first watch produced entirely by Breitling, and the B01 has a 70-hour power reserve with COSC certification. Navitimer movements, like the rest of the catalogue, are chronometer certified by COSC, which the Wikipedia page states as a general point about Breitling's mechanical and quartz calibres.

The automatic Navitimer chronograph has its own date. The first automatic Navitimer chronograph was introduced to the public in 1969, with a movement co-developed by Breitling, Dubois-Depraz, Heuer and Hamilton. That makes an early automatic a different proposition from a hand-wound one, and it makes the paperwork more valuable, not less. This is where reading watch service records earns its keep: invoices tell you which calibre a watch actually carries, when it was last attended to, and whether the person who worked on it knew the model.

06Does the space connection change the price?

In 1961, Scott Carpenter, one of the original astronauts in the Mercury programme, asked Breitling to incorporate a 24-hour dial in place of the normal 12-hour dial, because of the lack of day and night in space travel. Breitling produced the 24-hour Navitimer, which Carpenter wore on his 1962 flight, and then made a commercial version, the Cosmonaute Navitimer, carrying both Breitling and AOPA logos. A Cosmonaute is not a Navitimer with an extra marking; it reads on a 24-hour dial, and a buyer who does not want that should recognise it before negotiating.

07What about the rest of the Breitling catalogue?

Navitimer owners often end up looking across the range, and the same inspection habits travel. The SuperOcean, for instance, is a different instrument with different wear points, which is why a Navitimer buyer comparing case finishing and bezel action across models may find Breitling Superocean Heritage reading a dive a useful counterpoint. The point is not that one is better. It is that each reference tells you what to look at first, and on a Navitimer that is always the bezel and the dial scales.

08What the records do not settle

Two things remain outside the reach of any single page. The first is the Gallet acquisition: the Wikipedia page records that Breitling acquired Gallet in 2025, marked as needing a citation, so the detail is stated and flagged rather than confirmed. The second is the inner condition of any individual watch, which no reference guide can report. What a guide can do is tell you the questions worth asking and the parts worth touching.

So take the watch in hand, turn the bezel through its full travel, run the chronograph twice, and ask which calibre the seller believes is inside. Then put the answers beside checking a reference, and decide whether the paperwork and the bezel agree with the dial in front of you.

Entity note. Breitling SA is a Swiss watch manufacturer founded in 1884 in Saint-Imier by Léon Breitling, headquartered in Grenchen with production in La Chaux-de-Fonds, and owned by Partners Group since 2022. The Wikipedia page covers the company's ownership history, its product families including the Navitimer, Chronomat, Emergency and SuperOcean, its COSC certification, and its aeronautical sponsorship work. It is a company page rather than a buyer's guide: condition, originality and service history are not addressed there.