# Review - Fortis Cosmonaut GMT Chrono 603.22.11



## HappyJack

To judge from the number of postings along these lines, someone trying to choose a watch for business will be pulled in different directions at the same time. It should be presentable, but not too showy; functional, yet not shout either, "I'm a tool!" or, "I'm better paid than my boss!" and should present the wearer neither as a cheapskate nor a spendthrift. In some parts of the world, there is the added challenge of wearing something that can do double duty as a business watch during the day, whilst not drawing the wrong kind of attention at night in some side street food market.

Oh, and if you travel across time zones, you'll quickly find that a watch with a quick-set hour hand is much easier to use than one which requires you to hack the movement and reset it to a new time zone on arrival, especially if you like a reasonable degree of accuracy. Unless, of course, you want to carry another watch as a hack reference, or buy something with no second hand, and not worry about accuracy.

This tends to limit your choices. From a personal perspective, I travel relatively infrequently, but when I do it's a mixture of short-term interstate or international travel (which often means crossing time zones, with several changes over a few days) and longer-term business / personal travel. I probably spend 6 weeks a year outside my home time zone and want the travel GMT feature - ie, the quick-set hour hand. For pure functionality, it would be hard to beat my Casio GW-2500B-1AER - 3 time zones displayed simultaneously and the ability to manage the 15 and 30 minute off-sets found in places like Kathmandu (+05:45) and Adelaide (+09:30). The four alarms, stopwatch, solar charging and 200m water-resistance make it the ideal tool for trips to out of the way places, like Kathmandu and, erm, Adelaide. Amongst WIS favourites, only the Omega X-33 comes close - for ten times the price of the Casio. The trouble is that a G-Shock, though a highly effective tool, meets few of our emotional needs, nor does it necessarily make the right sort of statement to others, especially in those parts of the world where what you wear, for business meetings, matters.

Casio GW-2500B-1AER - The ultimate travel tool watch?









Unfortunately, if you want a true travel watch with a quick-set hour hand your choices are limited. Rolex and Omega have patented the most effective movements with GMT displays and quick-set hour hands leaving just a handful of other mechanical watches, the Seiko Spring Drive GMT models, or various quartz watches including digital, analog and ana-digital models. The mechanical solutions include the Oris World Timer (not the GMT Diver, which uses the regular 2893-2 GMT movement with quik-set GMT hand) which uses pushers to adjust the hour hand; IWC's UTC model (which displays the 2nd time zone in a cut-out window), or a select group of Fortis chronographs using a Valjoux 7750, modified to provide a 24 hour sub-register and a quick-set hour hand, in three different styles of case. I had another example of this genre, made by Fortis - the Pilot Professional GMT Chronograph, and it attracted compliments like no other watch I've had. Visually, it was a stunner, but it was compromised for me by the GMT display being hard to read at a glance, and the lack of a quick-set hour hand.

*The other GMT Fortis Chrono - the Fortis B-42 Pilot Professional GMT Chrono - a flawed stunner*









Another variation on the theme, the Fortis Cosmonaut GMT Chronograph (model 603.22.11), is the subject of this review. This is my ninth chronograph, and my third Fortis. The challenge chronograph manufacturers face in creating something that combines useful functionality, with excellent legibility, is something at which Fortis particularly excels. A Fortis crystal is virtually invisible thanks to the double-sided Anti Reflective Coating (ARC). You actually have to twist the watch around on the wrist to catch enough light to show that it actually has a crystal. Even this used example, where a previous owner appears to have polished off the external ARC, it looks as if there is no crystal. This helps make the display exceptionally clear.

*The Fortis Cosmonaut GMT Chronograph - in the smaller 39mm size*









The clarity is also due to design of the hands and the dial. The hour markers and numerals are in a thickly applied green coating of what the dial (the "T Swiss Made T" markings at the 6) says is tritium. It glows green like Luminova C3, lacks the torch-like quality of luminova when coming indoors from bright sunlight, yet is easy to read through the night, so probably is tritium. Unusually, there are four sub-registers: the permanent seconds display at 9 has a white hand with dial markers every 5 seconds; the 24 hour register at the 3 has a luminious hand and the dial is marked every hour, with numbers at 6, 12, 18 and 24 hour; whilst all the chrono hands are clearly shown as such, thanks to the orange colour - the centre sweep chrono second hand; the 30 minute sub-register at the 12 and the 12-hour accumulator at the 6. The 30-minute display has markers every minute, with a larger marker and numerals at the 10-, 20- and 30-minute marks; the 12 hour accumulator has every hour marked, with numerals at the 3, 6, 9 and 12 hour markers. 









Over several years I've had four chronographs with a Lemania 5100 type centre-sweep chronograph (two of them had the quartz ETA 251.262 equivalent)and five with sub registers, including a Fortis with the Valjoux 7750 display and a centre-sweep GMT hand. In my view, it's impossible to beat the centre-sweep analogue type display for at-a-glance chronograph readability. But this Fortis comes close. Like all Valjoux 7750 based movements, the chrono minute hand jumps on at the end of each minute whilst the chrono hour hand moves progressively. Combined with the orange hand colour, it's easy to read the elapsed time very quickly.

I find the 24 hour GMT sub-register quicker to read than the GMT hand on my earlier Fortis Pilot B-42 Pro GMT Chronograph. That's probably because the latter had the 24-hour markers not on the dial or on a bezel, but on the chapter ring, where they were hard to read at a glance; the 24 at bottom display was also less intuitive to someone not steeped in the arcane mysteries of 24 hour watches.

The overall visual effect is of a reasonably busy but highly legible display. The most important read-outs are most visible - the hour, minute and 24 hour hands, with their green lume; the next most important - the chrono markers, in orange are relatively subdued but stand out well when in use, and the permanent seconds are there but not in the way. The date window, white on black between the 4 and 5, is easy to read but blends into the background until you look at it - very neat.

Fortis engineers make Rolex engineers seem lazy. The same 39mm Cosmonaut Chronograph case has been seen in numerous variants - in steel, gold and platinum; with tachymetric, countdown and dive bezels; powered by a Lemania 5100, a normal Valjoux 7750, a 7750 with alarm and a 7750, as this one, with the GMT display. The GMT movement in this model is a rare and unusual one, but has also been seen in both the Flieger Chrono and the B-42 Cosmonaut Chrono cases.

Conventionally the GMT modification to the 7750 involves removal of the day window and a quick-set GMT hand slaved to the main hour hand, but independently set. Now, this is a good solution if you're mainly office-based in, say, London and want to know the time in Sydney. Set the time, make that early morning conference call to Sydney's evening, then simply reset the GMT hand to New York and a few hours later, give your American colleagues their early morning wake-up briefing. No need to hack the movement; just pull the crown to the first position and turn it in the opposite direction to that needed to set the date.

The problem with this solution comes once you step on a plane and start crossing time zones. You have to hack the movement to reset the main hour hand (presumably using the second watch you've carried with you to act as a time reference), which in turn resets the slaved GMT hand. Then, making sure that you have the correct time offset for your new time zone, reset the GMT hand to the correct time. I find that the Valjoux 7750 seems to have a little slack in it, so it inevitably seems to take a couple of tries to get the minute hand hitting the markers spot-on. And it's a nuisance having to take two watches.

So, what's the solution to this problem? Well, Omega's $8000 Speedmaster Solar Impulse is a great travel chrono but about 3 to 5 times the cost; or you could buy, for a bit more, an Omega Seamaster Aqua Terra GMT Chrono. Both use Omega's patented modifications to create a quick-set permanent hour hand and a GMT hand which stays set to the time you first set it (after all, GMT / UTC doesn't change just because you've changed time zones). There are also the quartz / spring-drive alternatives.

*Omega Solar Impulse - the rich man's Fortis Cosmonaut GT Chrono?*









Fortis' solution is a little different. The 24 hour hand found in the other versions has been geared up and become the main hour hand, complete with quick-set mechanism; whilst the mechanism usually driving the permanent hour hand has been de-geared and become the GMT display. This solves the hacking problem when crossing time zones. It's very easy to pull the crown to the first position without hacking the movement. Turn it one way, and you reset the date; the other way resets the hour hand. Perfect for the "five states in 5 days" trans-continental roadshows. A minor disadvantage is that the date still changes automatically along with the "home time" shown on the GMT register. Sub-optimal if your travel is intercontinental, but not really too much of a problem for a continental traveller if at 0050 local time your watch tells you it's the 11th of the month when it's actually the 12th where you are now, and very much better for those day trips from London to Paris than the usual modified 7750 solution. It would have been the ideal work watch for me in my days as a Royal Navy Navigator - working, as I did, predominantly in Zulu time (UTC).

I started with the quandary faced by the business traveller wanting a quality watch that didn't make the wrong kind of statement. Well, I reckon the Fortis scores pretty highly on that score. Apart from the clever way of dealing with the GMT hand, the overall look and feel exudes quality, not flash. There's a restrained touch of Rolex about the design - the screw-down chronograph pushers and the external tachymeter reference the Daytona whilst the 12.5mm thick stainless steel case is very similar in shape and size to Submariner; in contrast to the polished surfaces on those watches, though, the Fortis has a lovely blasted matte finish. The steel case back displays the Cosmonaut logo, the Fortis logo and the words, "Official Cosmonaut Chronograph". Mine is #1225 - I don't know how many of this model Fortis made, but it's certainly a rare bird - only the second one I've ever seen in the metal.









The Fortis fits easily under the cuff of a business shirt, but it's not too small - the 30 mm dial is the same size as a Submariner and the overall diameter is 42mm including the crown and guards. I love my Fortis B-42 Cosmonaut Chrono, but it's nearly 16mm thick, and 44mm across at the bezel - just a bit too big to fit comfortably under a shirt cuff; just a bit too noticeable to be discreet. The smaller version is much better in that respect.

*13mm thick...flat crystal - still very wearable, even under a business shirt cuff:*









So can I recommend the watch? Yes, definitely. It offers a great combination of a very wearable case, with a very clear display and a superb, quality feel. The Fortis Cosmonaut Chronograph, in non-GMT version is around $3000, new, but available at around the $2400 to $2700 mark. Whilst the GMT version is relatively rare, a quick look at Chrono24.com and eBay found a couple, NOS, including one on the very comfortable Fortis black leather strap - which complements it very well - at $2300. A dealer was recently selling a minter on Watchuseek for around same price, on a bracelet. I like the watch on the leather strap better than the bracelet - with that classic shape, it's an atavistic nod to the Daytona. Either way, at that price you get a high quality chrono, with a very handy travel GMT function that, whilst not absolutely perfect, is perfectly satisfactory for those interstate / international trips, when you don't want to take any unnecessary gear with you.

Is it a keeper? For my travel needs, it's probably too early to say. My business travel is a mixture of interstate day or overnight trips across 1 - 2 hour time zone changes, and longer, inter-continental trips halfway round the world. For a week-long Australian or European 5 cities road-show, it's ideal; for intercontinental travel I'd rather have the Rolex or Omega solution. But a Rolex GMT Master IIC or a Speedy Solar Impulse cost $7000 - $8000 and, right now, for me, don't provide that many dollars of marginal benefit. For office wear, the Fortis is a winner - functional (I do use the chronograph functions, a lot) but elegant. The GMT function just provides an additional layer of icing on the cake, at little or no money over the basic Valjoux 7750. I'd rate it 8.5 out of 10.


----------



## gaopa

Nice work! Thanks for sharing! Cheers, Bill P.


----------



## maj45k

HappyJack ...

What an excellent writeup sir! Thanks for taking the time to describe your search and what you see as the associate trade offs. As a guy who is just getting ready to start his Fortis GMT journey, I particularly appreciate your effort. 

Regards from Colorado,

Tony


----------



## waruilewi

Well thought out opinions, thanks for sharing. Still liking the B-42 Pilot Professional GMT Chrono more in terms of appearance however.


----------



## HappyJack

waruilewi said:


> Well thought out opinions, thanks for sharing. Still liking the B-42 Pilot Professional GMT Chrono more in terms of appearance however.


Yes - I think I'd agree with you you on that - the B-42 PP GMT Chrono is a stunner. But from a functional perspective, it falls short of the Cosmonaut GMT Chrono - which in turn doesn't _quite_ match up to the Omega GMT Chronos - though it also falls a L-O-N-G way short of their prices... Anyway - some gratuitous PP GMT Chrono shots, just for you...


----------



## gaopa

Those are more fine photos, Happy Jack! Thanks for sharing. Cheers, Bill P.


----------



## tantor67

I have had my Cosmonaut GMT Chrono for 6 years. It was my first high end watch and I still love it. Also mine is killer accurate about -2 for the week. Mine is on the bracelet and as far as I'm concerned it kicks a Rolex Daytona's ass! It just doesn't have the resale value. But the Daytona doesn't have a date or a GMT function either.


----------



## dmunz

*Dredging up a two-year old thread...*

I just picked one of these up. What a great watch! I satisfies my need for Ti + GMT + chrono. And I really like they way they tricked the GMT so I don't have to adjust it when I cross timezones. In all honesty, I would kill for a Solar Impulse with Ti lume but that won't ever happen.

For those of you who have more experience with Fortis, is there any chance I can get a copy of the COSC certificate from them? I sent an e-mail to thier CS address but they are all out on summer vacation until next week so I thought I'd ask here.

TIA
DLM


----------

