Aristo Sextant Flieger 5H40S

Acquired: 5/2011

I can’t say I’m a big fan of watches with gimmicky designs, or even those with Roman numerals, but the Aristo Sextant was a case of love at first sight. It was unusual (notice the backwards Arabic numerals above the Roman numerals?) and handsome.  The bead-blasted titanium case? The onion crown?  The riveted leather strap?  It all just oozes cool.  

I think I first spied this watch in 2009 or 2010, but it took until 2011 for me to get serious about purchasing one.  I looked around on various watch forums at first, hoping to find a bargain on one that had been slightly used.  No dice.  In fact, I think I only found a handful of folks on the entire internet who knew or owned one of these watches and they didn’t seem to have the slightest interest in selling.  

Around the same time I really starting getting serious about buying one of these, I noticed that the watch retailers selling them were slowly pulling the Flieger Sextant off their website.  (Great!  Now it’s out of production, too?)  I contacted Mark at Long Island Watch and he contacted Aristo on my behalf to see if they had any of these watches still for sale.  They responded that production had ended but they thought they just might have enough parts to make one last watch.  So, that’s the story:  This is the very last of the Aristo Sextant Fliegers and I own it.  (I have no idea if what Aristo said is actually true, but it sounds good and I’m sticking with it.)