The Orient Flight - A Budget Friendly Pilot Watch

Recently, on a hunt for a pilot watch, I discovered a small company by the name of Orient. Orient makes several varieties of automatic watches at great price points. They had several great looking designs and my eyes fell on the Flight model in particular. They offer three different options for case color and face color and I decided on the black PVD case and black face. I pulled the trigger for $169 and started counting down the two days it would take to arrive. (Thank you Amazon Prime!)

After pacing a hole in the floor waiting for the postal worker, I was finally face to face with this piece and let me tell you, it is beautiful. For the price, I was blown away by the quality of the watch. The case is a brushed black and the contrast of the white on the face makes this watch really stand out. At 42mm, the face of the watch looks large but the watch itself isn't overly imposing. Many pilot watches can push 46 and 47mm and I find that those look a little large on my wrists.

The watch came on a great quality black leather strap with Orient branding on the inside of the strap and the buckle. I had planned on replacing the black strap with a green one as I felt that the green would compliment the black case a bit better than the black strap. I purchased an OD Green ZULU Strap and a green canvas strap from Hadley Roma.

Although the case is great, it's the face of this watch that really steals the show. The B-Uhr style dial features minute tracking on the outside of the dial and hour tracking on the inside. This took some getting used to when reading the time, but I've really grown to love it. A small date window is located at 3 o'clock and unfortunately, at time it can be hard to read. You can definitely make out the date, but it doesn't really pop out at you and some dates, like the 10th, are difficult to make out as the one is almost hidden.

I prefer pilot watches to be simple in design and clutter-free faces and this is where the Orient takes a couple hits in my book. There's not a whole lot of clutter going on, but the logo with the name, Automatic, Water Resist and 100m does take up quite a bit of space. These watches were originally designed to allow pilots to quickly read the time without confusion and a clean face is important. Nevertheless, the face still stands out and looks relatively clean. Whatever marks this watch loses for the face, it makes up for with the lume. The lume on this watch is nothing short of incredible! Extremely bright and very easy to read, it stays brightly charged for a few hours and I was able to make out the time even 10 hours after it had been charged.

The movement in this watch is an in-house automatic movement created by Orient. This is definitely impressive for a watch in this price point and the watch definitely keeps great time. I noticed that it was losing ~2 seconds per day and that definitely works for me. Unfortunately, the movement does not offer hacking ability which I really miss. I love to sync my watches up exactly with time.is and I miss the ability to do that on this watch. Overall, I'm really impressed with this piece. For $169, there's not much out there that beats it. If you're on the fence about a pilot watch and don't want to make the ~$1000 jump, check out the Flight from Orient.