Since the BR-01 arrived in 2005, Bell & Ross has turned a dozen cockpit instruments into watches. The Radar is the boldest of them, and after 15 years in red, its new chapter is green
Not everyone warms to green. The BR-03 Green Radar Ceramic may change that. Here the colour isn’t an afterthought but the whole idea, carried through the watch from the first layer of sapphire to the last.
It starts with the sapphire crystal, which is coloured green throughout and has an anti-reflective coating. The hour markers and graduations are printed in green beneath it. Underneath, three black discs carry a green gradient, and each disc holds a miniature aircraft marked in Dark Green Super-LumiNova. In the dark, the whole dial glows green, much like the surveillance screens that inspired it.
The colour marks a clear break with the past. Bell & Ross’s 2011 Red Radar, with its crystal tinted the red of an air-traffic control room, quickly became one of the brand’s best-sellers, and that same year it got a Singapore edition of its own. The 2014 and 2021 Red Radars kept the colour going. Now green sweeps the dial instead: the colour of next-generation radar screens.
What hasn’t changed is the absence of hands. Three stacked discs rotate independently, each carrying its own Dassault aircraft. The Falcon business jet takes 12 hours to circle the dial and shows the hours. The Rafale fighter shows the minutes, and the Neuron stealth drone goes round once a minute to mark the seconds. For the first time in the collection, the aircraft and their glowing radar trails appear together on the dial, as they would on a real air-surveillance display. Earlier editions showed one or the other.
The two levels give the dial real depth, with moving aircraft below and fixed green markers above. Your eye sweeps across it like an air-traffic controller looking for the next aircraft. Each disc has to be light enough not to drain the 54-hour power reserve of the BR-CAL.327 automatic movement, yet stiff enough not to bend or rub against the others. All three are adjusted to within a micron of each other.
The rest of the watch is black, so the green stands out. The case is scratch-resistant, micro-blasted black ceramic, 41mm wide and 10.6mm thick. This is also the first time the Radar display has appeared in a 41mm BR-03, so the scale on the dial is tighter. The case back is engraved with the three aircraft. The strap comes in black rubber or black synthetic fabric, with a steel pin buckle in black PVD, and the watch is water-resistant to 100 metres.
