Miles Davis was born in 1926, and for most of his career he wore a Breitling Navitimer. That is the whole premise of the watch Breitling brought to Geneva Watch Days 2026: the Navitimer B09 Chronograph 41 Tribute to Miles Davis, a 500-piece steel edition timed to his centenary. Time+Tide covered it hands-on, and Breitling lists it at breitling.com. It is a tribute that leans on real biography rather than a logo, and the watch itself is a careful piece of period revival.
A reverse-panda Navitimer
The dial is black with three silver subdials, a reverse panda, which is the layout most collectors associate with the Navitimers of Davis's era. Breitling has reinstated the historic Twin-Jet logo beneath twelve, the winged mark it used before the anchor, and the hour markers and hands carry cream-coloured Super-LumiNova rather than a bright white, so the dial reads warm and slightly aged from the start. Around it sits the Navitimer's defining feature, the circular slide rule on the bidirectional bezel, printed against a white outer track. Nothing on the dial is louder than it needs to be, and the tribute is in the restraint.
The Air Racer bracelet comes back
The other piece of revival is the bracelet. The Air Racer, the perforated steel bracelet with its two large drilled holes, disappeared from Breitling's catalogue in 2019, and it returns here. It is a distinctive, slightly polarising design, and it fixes the watch firmly in the 1960s and 70s. Buyers who want the quieter option get a leather strap instead, and the two choices change the character of the watch more than the price does.
Caliber B09
Inside is the hand-wound Caliber B09, the manually wound member of Breitling's in-house chronograph family. It runs at 28,800 vibrations an hour, holds 70 hours of reserve and is a COSC-certified chronometer, and going without an automatic rotor lets the case stay at 13mm despite the 41mm width. The caseback, engraved MILES DAVIS CENTENNIAL and ONE OF 500, frames the movement through sapphire. Water resistance is a dress-watch 30m, which is the right call for a watch built around a slide rule rather than a dive bezel.
Price, and the wider edition
The steel Navitimer B09 Chronograph 41 Tribute to Miles Davis is EUR 8,900 on leather and EUR 9,450 on the Air Racer bracelet, limited to 500 pieces. Above it sit rarer executions in yellow gold and platinum, brought together with the steel watch in a Miles Davis Edition presentation set that also holds a red trumpet and a portrait of Davis. Breitling has attached a two-year membership in its Breitling Social Club, opening in Brooklyn, to the purchase, which places the launch as much in the brand's lifestyle programme as in its catalogue.
Anniversary watches are easy to get wrong, usually by adding a signature or a colour and calling it a tribute. This one works because the parts it revives, the Twin-Jet logo, the reverse-panda dial and the Air Racer bracelet, are the parts that actually connect to the man and the period. The result is a Navitimer that would make sense even without the name on the caseback.
