Tudor takes to the skies with new Pelagos FXD ‘Zulu Time’

Tudor’s latest military timepiece is the Pelagos FXD GMT ‘Zulu Time', a French Naval Aviation collaboration ready to take to the skies.

Announced on 30th October, the new watch is a tough-looking timepiece, thanks to its 42mm titanium case and one-piece fabric strap finished in what Tudor calls “flight-suit green”.

Fixed strap bars, where the strap threads through the case, rather than around a set of removable lug bars, further suggests this is a watch built to handle a harsh environment. In fact, Tudor says how the case was machined from a single block of Grade 2 titanium.

The dial appears simple at first glance, but it can actually keep track of three time zones at once. The first is shown by the hands in the conventional way, while an additional orange hand points to Zulu Time, which is what military services use to describe Universal Time Coordinated (UTC) and Greenwich Meantime (GMT).

A third timezone can then be calculated by using the orange hand and the bidirectional rotating bezel, which is marked with a 24-hour timescale.

Turn the watch around and you’ll see how the Grade 5 titanium case back is engraved with the Aéronautique navale (French Naval Aviation) logo and the inscription ‘M.N.24’ (Marine nationale 2024). This marking takes inspiration from the original Tudor M.N. engravings seen on watches of the 1970s and ‘80s.

Other details include a matte black dial with hour markers (as well as the hands and 24-hour markings of the bezel) finished in beige-coloured Swiss Super-LuminNova, which glows blue in low light.

The watch is driven by Tudor’s Calibre MT5652-U automatic movement, which has a silicon balance spring, 28 jewels and a lengthy 65 hours of power reserve. This makes the watch ‘weekend-proof’, meaning it can be taken off on a Friday evening and still be showing the correct time by Monday morning. Waterproofing is to 200 metres, and the watch is resistant to magnetic fields of 15,000 gauss.

Priced at £4,000 and not a limited-edition piece, the Tudor Pelagos FXD GMT is available to buy now.