Oris Introduces a Pilot's Watch That Runs for 10 Days

Imagine winding your watch on a Monday morning. You wear it all week, set it on the dresser for the weekend, and forget about it. The following Wednesday, it’s still ticking. No battery. No solar cell. No rotor quietly winding it on your wrist. Just a single spring, slowly letting go of the energy you gave it nine days earlier.

That’s the promise of the new Oris ProPilot Calibre 111, released this October. But the most interesting part of this watch isn’t how long it runs. It’s the comeback story hiding inside it.

Oris was founded in 1904 in the small Swiss town of Hölstein. For decades it built its reputation on dependable mechanical watches at honest prices, and it made its own movements to power them. Then, in the 1970s, cheap and accurate quartz watches swept through the industry. Swiss watchmaking nearly collapsed. Oris survived, but at a cost. It stopped developing its own movements and began relying on ones supplied by outside manufacturers.

It stayed that way for 35 years. A company that once built its own mechanical hearts spent more than three decades borrowing someone else’s. For a watchmaker, that’s a long time to go without a signature.

Then, in 2014, Oris marked its 110th birthday. Most brands celebrate an anniversary with a special dial or a limited edition. Oris unveiled Calibre 110, a brand-new hand-wound movement of its own, and it didn’t play it safe. The movement could run for ten days on a single winding.

The secret is a spring you’d never guess fits inside a watch. Coiled into one oversized barrel is a mainspring roughly 1.8 meters long, nearly six feet of tempered metal wound into a space smaller than a coin. Most mechanical watches store enough energy for about two days. Oris packed in five times that, without resorting to the multiple barrels other long-running watches often need.

A spring that long brings its own problem. It doesn’t unwind evenly, so a normal fuel-gauge style indicator would mislead you. Oris solved this with a patented non-linear power reserve display that gives you more detail as the watch nears the end of its run. In other words, the gauge gets most precise right when you need it. A year later, Calibre 111 added a date, and the movement found a fitting home in the ProPilot pilot’s watch collection: a watch built to be ready when you need it.

The 2026 version is a refinement rather than a reinvention. The steel case is a little smaller and slimmer at 43mm, the dials come in black or pine green, and the fluted bezel takes its cue from jet-engine turbines. Small seconds sit at nine o’clock, the power reserve at three, and the date has moved to six for a cleaner, more balanced face. It starts at $7,200 on a leather strap and $7,400 on a steel bracelet in the United States. That’s serious money for a brand known for value, but you’re buying the movement that marked Oris’s return to making its own.

And Oris kept the part that matters most. The Calibre 111 is still wound by hand. Every few days, or every ten if you push it, you turn the crown and feel the spring tighten. It’s a small, deliberate ritual that connects you to watchmaking as it was done long before automatic movements came along.

Oris didn’t need to reinvent anything in 2026. The hard work was done more than a decade ago. What it did was recognize something extraordinary it already had, and give it a home that today’s collectors would want to wear.

So picture that Monday morning again. Turn after turn of the crown, six feet of spring winds tighter, storing energy for the days ahead. You go about your week. The weekend comes and goes. And roughly ten days later, around Thursday of the following week, the watch finally rests, waiting for you to wind it again.