Introducing the Tutima Flieger in Slate Grey

Tutima has expanded their Flieger line with a new watch with a slate grey dial and an attractive degradé effect. The new Tutima Flieger is a value oriented alternative to something like the M2 Chronograph which we covered earlier this month, and would appear to offer a lot of a tool watch aesthetic that borrows from a different era of military watches, and might be better suited to everyday, casual wear. Let’s take a look. 

Tutima’s Flieger watches are based on their pilot’s watches that date back to the 1940s, and they maintain much of the traditional style you expect from an aviation watch of the time period. Legibility, of course, is the main concern with any pilot’s watch, and the Flieger makes use of high contrast dial elements to make time telling simple at a glance. Arabic numerals at every hour marker (large and bold for the hours themselves, slightly smaller and integrated into the marker for the minutes) in crisp  white are easy to spot against a gray dial that gets darker as you approach the perimeter. At 12:00 you’ll find the traditional triangular marker that is a hallmark of the flieger genre, as are the elongated diamond shaped “flieger” style hands. The orange second hand adds an additional contrasting color and a bit of visual interest.

The stainless steel case measures 41mm in diameter, and is mounted to your choice of a leather strap or stainless steel bracelet. The movement is Tutima’s Calibre 330, an automatic movement based on the ETA 2836. It’s a virtually bulletproof and easy to service movement that’s the perfect choice for a casual sports watch like this. Although this watch has the word “Flieger” in its name, I think it’s worth pointing out that between the traditional case style, wearable size, conservative dial layout, and a proven Swiss movement, that the Flieger Slate Grey seems positioned to be a daily wear candidate for anyone who is simply looking for a solid and sporty casual watch, regardless of whether or not you ever find yourself in the cockpit of a plane, or even have any interest at all in flight. 

The Flieger Slate Grey retails for $1650 on a strap and $1990 on a bracelet. There are, of course, a lot of choices at this price point – any number of brands make similarly specced watches at roughly the same price, and also considerably less. This watch sits near the entry point for Tutima, and for a brand with many hardcore adherents, it feels like a solid way to buy into a unique German brand with some real military heritage. Tutima is one of those extremely niche brands that you just don’t see on many wrists, so there’s a uniqueness factor at work here too. 

Besides a fondness for the brand, which you may or may not have, the real draw here is the grey dial. We’re in a moment in the watch enthusiast space where color (green in particular) is being used in adventurous ways in new watch designs, and that’s a great thing. Grey doesn’t have the primary color pop that I think most people are looking for when they think about dial options outside the norm, but it’s strangely under utilized by big watch brands, and tends to be a versatile color that works well on a wide variety of watches. The degradé effect seen here is a great touch and makes what most would think of as a somber or drab color a little bit more exciting. 

More information can be found at Tutima’s website, right here.