As you may have
read on my home page, I have a preference for mechanical chronographs. Even better for me are watches with an aviation link. There are several Omegas that fit this
discription.
Obviously the Speedmaster comes to mind and a 1965 Pre-Pro was my first Omega.
Next was an old
Air Ministry 6B/159 from 1943.
These are both watches that have a real
aviation/space history. The AM was really a military watch, and the Speedmaster
(although designed as a watch for automobile racing) was used by NASA for the Moon program. That left one Omega on my wish list that was more suited to commercial
aviation, the Flightmaster.
The Flightmaster is one of the first
watches, as far as I know, that combines a chronograph with a second time zone. Chronographs have always been (and still are) used in aviation for numerous
tasks. This holds true for military, commercial and private aviation. For years already however chronographs are standard equipment in airliners and since most airline pilots change time zones several times a week they have just as much use for a second time zone in their
watch. The Flightmaster is one of the first watches that was tailored to those
needs. If you look at the dial you will find that it closely resembles the Speedmaster
dial, but has two important differences.
Firstly, it has an internal 0-60 scale that can be set by turning the lower crown on the left
side. The Speedmaster had a tachymeter scale (on the bezel) but in the modern aircraft of the 70's you didn't need to calculate your own groundspeed
anymore, so this was of little use. The 0-60 scale can be used to time short intervals both in minutes and seconds without having to stop/start the
chronograph.
Secondly and most importantly it has a secondary hour hand that can be set independently from the primary hour hand by the top crown on the left
side. You can set this hand without stopping or changing the main time
indication, and therefore it makes sense to set local time on the blue hand, and
GMT/UTC on the white hour hand. If you change time zones you can simply set the blue hand to the new time zone using the time difference from UTC that's on the white hand. I don't consider this to be a true
"GMT watch" as you can not tell whether it's AM or PM.
For such a complicated watch the readability is still fairly
good, and I very much like the styling of it.
The case is a typical product of the
seventies. Plain round cases were out of style, and Omega used an extraordinarily formed case.
Also, rather modern in those days, they used a flat mineral crystal that is flush with the top of the case. This makes for a high looking
watch, and together with the covered springbars a very massive looking thing. I wouldn't call it
pretty, but it's rather impressive and makes for a nice change to all those classic round cases.
The quality of it all is excellent,
probably on par with the best, and certainly better then most.
One thing that immediately draws your
attention, more even then the extra hour hand, is the number of crowns and buttons. Five in
total. I don't know many watches that have more. To make the functionality of these crowns and buttons
clear, Omega colour-coded them. Also something that was pretty extraordinary. As you will
understand, the blue crown sets the blue hour hand. The black crown sets the 0-60
scale. And the orange chronographs hands are started, stopped and reset by the
orange/red coloured buttons.
On many Flightmasters these coloured dots have
disappeared, but on mine the black and blue are still perfect,.
while the probably more used chrono buttons have lost most of their
colour. 
On the screw-in case back Omega leaves no doubt to which purpose this watch was
designed. It shows a generic jet airliner, resembling the narrow body long distance aircraft that were common in the 60's . 
My example is from 1972, and has the caliber 911. There was one other version of the Flightmaster in which the running second hand in the left register was replaced by an extra 24-hour hand and a colour coded register that showed AM-PM making this a true
GMT-watch. The caliber in that watch was the 910. The trade off is that you can not tell it's running by a simple
glance. Both are modified cal.861 which is the well know Lemania based movement also used in the
Speedmaster. Very reliable, accurate and nice to look at. Here's the movement from my
watch. It looks completely identical to the 861 as far as I can tell. The only visible difference is the small wheel next to the serial
number, connecting the blue crown to the secondary hour hand via a mechanism that must be on the dial
side. 
Not much information is available on these Flightmasters. They are obviously a lot rarer then the
Speedmaster, but there is not as much demand too. A good Flightmaster will set you back nearly as much as a descent cal.861 Speedmaster Pro, and a lot less then a good cal.321
Speedmaster. 
Although this watch was primarily aimed at the airline pilot, it was also worn during a space program. Alexei Leonov, the Russian Cosmonaut, wore an Omega Flightmaster during training for his command of the first crew for the first joint Soviet-American space mission under the ASTP program (Apollo-Soyuz Test Project). During the second mission that was under his command, the Soyuz spacecraft docked with the US Apollo spacecraft – the first docking ever between two spacecraft from two different countries. I'm not sure if he ever wore the Flightmaster in space because in an other picture he's wearing a Speedmaster Pro, but here is a picture from the Omega website, that shows him wearing it.
All in all I'm very happy with my latest Omega. I think I've found a nice example that appears to be in a very good and
original condition.
For more information on this very special Omega model you can have a look on the next websites:
Omega Flightmaster Owners Group by Rani Bar Hama
Watches in the Omega "Pilot Line". by Steve Waddington
And for general questions, on this and other Omega watches my favorite Omega forum: