Breguet Type XX Chronographe 2075: A Luxury Pilot’s Watch Goes Back to its Roots

The Breguet Type XX, originally produced for France’s military pilots in the 1950s, is one of the most significant and influential watches with aviation ties, and represents the historical and, to many watch enthusiasts, largely unknown link between the Breguet family’s two areas of multigenerational savoir faire: watchmaking and aeronautical technology. The new Type XX Chronographe 2075, unveiled last week as part of Montres Breguet’s ongoing celebration of its 250th anniversary, stylishly pays tribute to this shared history in two distinctive iterations based on one of the very first civilian-marketed models.

Origin of the Type XX

A bit of history and background: Abraham-Louis Breguet, founder of the eponymous watchmaking maison, is known to many of us as one of the world’s most important watchmaking pioneers, whose many accomplishments include the invention of the tourbillon, keyless winding of watch movements, and the ubiquitous Breguet hands. Several generations of his family continued the horological tradition, but one great grandson, Louis-Charles Breguet, found another calling, in the burgeoning field of manned flight, founding Breguet Aviation in 1911. The company, today a part of Dassault Aviation, developed cutting-edge aircraft for the military units of Louis’ native France, including the famed Breguet 19 bomber used during World War I. Despite the ownership change in the watch business, both branches of the Breguet families kept close ties both to each other and their companies, which led to the creation of the original Type 20 watches (as they were all then known, with the Arabic rather than Roman numeral) in the 1950s.

Type XX or Type 20?

“Type 20” refers to a set of specifications, ordered by the French Ministry of Defense, that a watch would require in order to be issued to its pilots — most significantly, the inclusion of a flyback chronograph function, which was far from a standard item at the time. Breguet and several other watchmakers responded, with Breguet’s model becoming perhaps the most famous and most enduring, worn by French Air Force and Navy pilots starting in 1953 and remaining in regular usage until the 1980s. Breguet started making civilian versions of the Type 20 (differentiating them from the military-issue versions by the use of “XX” in place of “20”) shortly thereafter, and it is one of the very first of these models — in fact, the first one in a gold case, released in 1955 and pictured above — that provides the template for the new Ref. 2075.

Next to each other, the watches have some striking differences, but let’s start with the similarities. Both new Breguet Type XX timepieces feature a period-appropriate 38.3mm case made from Breguet Gold, a new proprietary alloy that made its debut on another high-profile 250th anniversary release, the Souscription 2025. The case measures 13.2mm thick and sports a satin-brushed case middle, a bidirectionally rotating 12-hour bezel with a fluted edging, a fluted onion-shaped crown, and pump-style pushers to operate the built-in stopwatch with its flyback function. Water-resistant to 50 meters, the case has a sapphire crystal over the dial with double-sided AR coating and a “Breguet 250 Years” inscription on the sapphire crystal caseback.

Breguet Type XX Chronographe 2075: One Watch, Two Styles

The dials are where the two new Type XX Chronographe models start to sharply diverge aesthetically. On one, the non-limited version (Ref. 2075BH/99/398), the dial is in black anodized aluminum with vintage-style Arabic numerals and a classical bicompax “Big Eye” arrangement, in which the subdial at 3 o’clock — the 15-minute counter that is most useful for a pilot — is larger and more prominent than the running seconds subdial at 9 o’clock. The syringe-style hands and the applied Breguet logo at 12 o’clock are in the same Breguet gold as the case, crown and pushers; the hands and numerals (including the central gold-plated chronograph hand) are all treated with beige luminescent paint that glows green in the dark. The choice of aluminum (actually Duralumin, an alloy of 95 percent aluminum) for the dial is another subtle tribute to Louis Breguet and his pioneering use of Duralumin sheet metal in his aircraft, and a discreet “Al” between 7 and 8 o’clock on the dial verifies its presence.

The other new Breguet Type XX, Ref. 2075BH/G9/398, limited to 250 numbered pieces, hearkens back to one of the most obscure and somewhat offbeat early versions of the model, with its satin-brushed 925 silver dial; thinner and more elegant Arabic numerals; smaller, sectored subdials of the same size at 3 and 9 o’clock (no “Big Eye” unbalanced look here) and a tachymetric scale printed on the dial’s periphery, a feature we now associate much more with car racing than flying. According to Breguet, this silver-dial execution actually preceded the black-dialed model to the civilian market, but was quickly eclipsed in popularity by the latter, with its more traditional pilot look, and is an extreme rarity among vintage Breguet watches today. The Breguet gold case has the same dimensions and the same satin-brushed finishing, while the central chronograph hand is more thin and understated, made of blued steel rather than gold-coated. As on the other watch’s anodized copper dial, this precious metal dial’s provenance appears discreetly with an “Ag925” inscription between 7 and 8 o’clock. 

Caliber 7278/7279: A Historical Movement

A milestone in Breguet aviation history provides the inspiration for the intricately executed decoration on the movements, the manually winding manufacture Caliber 7278 and 7278. In 1930, three years after Charles Lindbergh’s record-setting flight in the Spirit of St. Louis from New York to Paris in 1927, two French pilots, Dieudonne Costes and Maurice Bellonte, approached Louis Breguet about making the trip in the opposite direction — from Paris to New York, a more difficult route due to the headwinds. As if to attest to the questionable feasibility of such a feat at the time, the aircraft Breguet provided for the attempt — the Breguet 19TR Super Bidon — had a large white question mark on its red fuselage (see above). The question was answered in the affirmative, however, when Costes and Bellonte made the trip in 37 hours, from the 1st to the 2nd of September, ensuring a place in aviation history both for the pilots and their Breguet plane — as well as inspiring the visual tribute on this watch’s miniature engine. 

Both movements in the new Breguet Type XX watches — Caliber 7278 in the limited edition, with a 30-minute counter at 3 o’clock, and Caliber 7279 in the unlimited model, with the aforementioned 15-minute “Big Eye” counter — are based on the recently introduced automatic Caliber 728. Like their parent movement, both boast a 5-Hz balance frequency and a 60-hour power reserve as well as the integrated chronograph with flyback that is an essential element of the Type XX models historically. Removing the self-winding oscillating mass of Caliber 728 opened up the movement’s surface area for the breathtaking miniature engraving applied to it: a depiction of the Breguet 19 plane in flight over the smooth-finished Atlantic Ocean, with the American and European landmasses, both with frosted finishes, representing the beginning and endpoint of the historic 1930 flight. 

Both versions of the Breguet Type XX Chronographe 2075 are mounted on contrast-stitched calfskin leather straps — gradient black for the black-dialed model, gradient blue for the silver-dialed limited edition — and fasten to the wrists with pin buckles forged from the same proprietary gold as the cases. The black-dialed Ref. 2075BH/99/398 carries an MSRP of $43,500, while the 250 numbered pieces of the silver-dialed Ref. 2075BH/G9/398 sell for $45,200.