The New Longines 39mm Spirit Zulu Time Goes Titanium

With a heritage dating back to 1832 in St-Imier, Switzerland, Longines’ nearly 200 years of watchmaking has resulted in a robust product line encompassing models that focus on technical innovation, “tool watch” functionality and classicism, elegant evening sophistication, and beyond.

Thus, as you can probably surmise, attempting to peg a single Longines execution as a perfect avatar for the brand can become a bit dangerous.

However, the new 39mm Spirit Zulu in titanium, recently debuted, may well be that singular watch, at least for the Longines of now. Please bear with me as I attempt a feat of considerable derring-do and let me make my case by reflecting on my views of some of Longines’ primary pillars of watchmaking.

Longines filed a patent in 1908 for the first pocket watch to keep time in the decidedly aviation-useful realm of two time zones, with the brand’s wristwatches incorporating the same technology by 1925.
 

Fold in Longines’ enviable fandom by golden age aviators like Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh, and Howard Hughes among others, and you can see the brand’s roots run deep in the world of timekeepers optimized for pilots.

Fast forwarding to the present day and veering away from the Zulu Time for a bit, let’s look at the off-axis Longines Avigation Type A-7 1935 timepiece from 2017 as a more direct ode to the maker’s in-flight heritage.
 

There’s a big dose of “deliberate” heritage in the Avigation. So, when Longines launched its new vision for the core Longines Spirit Collection in 2020, that golden age heritage was beautifully translated into a much more deliberately modern and cleaned-up execution of a pilot watch.

Although they were executed at 40mm and 42mm in steel (with some titanium models following), the throughline between those Spirit models and the current 39mm Spirit Zulus, including this new titanium iteration, is apparent.

In 2020, Longines offered a very nice chronograph in the otherwise two-hand Spirt Collection. Three years later, a Spirit Flyback model came onto the scene. A flyback chronograph function is certainly useful in flight, especially for instrument-free aviation navigation.

However, there’s a purer take on what a pilot really needs from a watch: legibility in all cockpit conditions and often a second reference time zone for voyages that cross long distances. This latest Spirit Zulu Time model checks those boxes.
 

The new line of steel Longines Spirit Zulu Time models was revealed last year. Simply put, the concept of Zulu Time is a byproduct of the military’s efforts to create a standardized set of time zones so international armed forces, including pilots, could better coordinate activities.

With each time zone designated a letter from the NATO phonetic alphabet, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) – formerly Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) – is indicated by the letter “Z,” hence “Zulu Time.” As such, the collection’s signature bold-arrowed GMT hand has come to define the models.

Is it possible that this new Zulu Time’s simple upgrade to lightweight, durable Grade 5 titanium not only distills the brand’s rich heritage and design zeitgeist but also pushes it more definitely into the spotlight?