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There are few things that I enjoy writing about more than a crazy new watch from Bell & Ross. These watches are catnip for me, whether it’s something along the lines of my beloved Multimeter, a watch incorporating a giant skull, or a case that gets the full lume treatment, I can’t help myself. Bell & Ross, when they’re weird, is one of my all time favorite brands, full stop. So it was with a great deal of interest that I came across the announcement of the all new BR-03 Horizon limited edition last week, the latest in the brand’s series of watches inspired by on-board aircraft instrumentation. Of course, it could be argued that any of the square cased Bell & Ross watches share this inspiration, sharing an aesthetic as they do with a kind of generic idea of a gauge that you might see in a cockpit, but the watches in this series take a more literal approach. The BR-03 Gyrocompass, for instance, has a dial that is dressed up as, well, a gyrocompass. And this limited edition, along those same lines, brings the artificial horizon to your wrist.
The artificial horizon is an essential tool for pilots, providing them with basic spatial orientation that is essential for safely piloting an aircraft. The gauge is quite simple, and shows at a quick glance an approximation of a an aircraft’s position relative to the surface of the earth. It’s particularly important for pilots flying in conditions where visibility might be an issue, such as in the dark or night or through bad weather. Knowing where “down” and “up” are in relation to your plane is, for obvious reasons, critical.
For this edition of the BR-03, we have a dial that is made up of a circle divided in half, with the upper part in light blue representing the sky and the lower part in black representing the earth. The two red lines running across the dial (which is actually a decal applied to the underside of the crystal) represent the aircraft itself – if the red “wings” are parallel to the ground, the hypothetical airplane is level.
Reading the time is relatively straightforward once you understand which components of the artificial horizon have been transposed to time telling duty. The long white hand reads the minutes via the outer internal bezel ring, and the long white and black striped hand is your running seconds. The hours are not read by a hand at all, but rather by the inner dial itself, which is constantly rotating – the large black triangle will give you an accurate hour reading.
The BR-03 case is crafted from microblasted black ceramic and measures 41mm across 10.6mm tall. It’s 100 meters water resistant and mounted to a black rubber strap (it also ships with an orange strap in a synthetic fabric). The movement is the BR-CAL.327, an automatic caliber with a 54 hour power reserve.
This isn’t the wildest Bell & Ross we’ve ever seen, but if you stand back and take stock of what it actually is, it’s kind of a weird thing. Obviously, it only simulates the look of an artificial horizon, but doesn’t have any real functionality beyond normal time telling. So it would be fair to level a “form over function” criticism here. Personally, I find the very idea of the literal transposition of aircraft gauge design into a watch to be kind of fun, and I enjoy seeing how Bell & Ross is able to creatively reproduce what a pilot sees in the cockpit in watch form. It’s an amusing (if ultimately pointless) design exercise, and the fact that Bell & Ross engages in this type of thing with some frequency is one of the reasons I’ve become such a big fan over the years.
The BR-03 Horizon is a limited edition of 999 pieces. The retail price is $4,600. Bell & Ross
