Citizen Promaster Skyhawk A-T Blue Angels JY8078-01L«Blue Angels»

Imagen: Citizen, web oficial

The storyWhy this reference matters

The relationship between Citizen and the Blue Angels, the US Navy's flight demonstration squadron, has run for more than twenty-five years by the brand's own account. It started with a Navihawk, continued in 2002 when Eco-Drive reached the Skyhawk in squadron livery, and carried on in 2009 with Super Titanium versions and radio time reception. Few sporting partnerships in watchmaking last that long without wearing thin: what repeats here is not a logo stuck on, it is a whole range.

The A-T suffix is the key to the watch and almost nobody explains it properly. It stands for atomic timekeeping, but there is no atomic clock inside the case: there is a radio receiver listening to the time signals broadcast from Germany, the United States, China and Japan, signals that do come from atomic clocks. The watch wakes at night, listens, corrects itself and goes back to sleep. In Europe the useful transmitter is the German one, and with the watch near a window the whole business happens without the owner noticing.

The rest of the function list belongs to a fat instruction manual: world time, UTC, a perpetual calendar programmed to 2099, a chronograph reading to a hundredth with 24-hour capacity, two alarms, a 99-minute timer, a power reserve indicator and 4,800 A/m of magnetic resistance. This is the maximalist end of pilot's watchmaking, the exact opposite of the clean-dial school.

SpecificationsThe numbers, in one table

IdentificationHow to tell it apart

A 45 mm steel case, 14.3 thick, sapphire crystal with anti-reflective coating and 200 metres of water resistance. The dial is blue with yellow accents, the squadron colours, and Citizen describes this series as carrying the Blue Angels insignia on the caseback. If the back is plain and has no insignia, it is not a Blue Angels, however blue the dial.

The difference between finishes of this same base reference is what sits on your wrist: the -01L is the one on a leather strap stitched in blue and yellow, while the steel bracelet version carries a different suffix. It is the detail that causes most confusion in listings, because the watch is the same and the catalogue photo looks completely different.

Inside is the Eco-Drive U680 calibre, with about six months of power reserve and up to three and a half years with power-save engaged. The sign that you are looking at an A-T and not an ordinary Skyhawk is the reception indicator on the dial and the power reserve indicator, neither of which appears on the models without radio.

CollectingWhat collectors check

Size comes first, and it is not a small matter: 45 millimetres across by 14.3 thick is an enormous watch for an average wrist, and on the leather strap the whole thing tends to rock if the diameter is not matched. This is a model you have to try on. Buying it from photographs is the fastest route to regret.

Checking a used A-T has two points of its own. One: the digital display. Run through every mode and make sure no segment is missing, because an LCD with dead segments is not cheap to fix and is reason enough to drop the purchase. Two: reception. If the seller says it «never sets itself», it is almost always a question of placement — the watch needs to spend the night near a window and away from electronics — rather than a fault in the receiver.

And finally, the power. Check that the reserve indicator moves and that the watch responds after a day in the light. An example that has spent years in a drawer goes into power-save and can look dead without being dead, but one that does not recover after several sessions in direct light has a spent cell. The leather strap, on the other hand, is pure consumable: if it is dried out, do not knock too much off the price for it.

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