After a stretch of El Primero and Defy releases, Zenith gave us not just a refresh of their famous Pilot watch collection but one that is, save for the name, entirely new altogether. For Watches & Wonders 2023, the only brand with the rights to use the word ?Pilot? for its pilot watches came in strong with four new pieces.

The Zenith Pilot Automatic and Pilot Big Date Flyback are fresh new designs that take cues from historic styles but avoid tired rehashing. In rounded cases with flat bezels and nice grippable crowns, the highly legible new Pilot watches have large Arabic numerals on the dial as well as date windows at 6 o?clock (albeit two different styles of date windows). Of course, the sizes are different, with the Pilot Automatic measuring 40mm wide and the Pilot Big Date Flyback measuring 42.5mm with either steel or ceramic case iterations for both. While simple in design, the steel cases have an excellent contrast of brushed and polished finishing with chamfering throughout. The ceramic cases are fully micro blasted to create that nice matte finish, which I think was certainly the way to go as a glossy finish just wouldn?t work here. All are also water resistant to 100 m which certainly boosts its everyday wear bona fides. 
The Pilot Automatic is a classic pilot?s watch that emphasizes legibility above all else. Rarely are hour numerals (applied and done in a sans-serif font here) as properly large and lumed as the hour and minutes hands b...