EVENT: At the Avalon Airshow with Oris

Felix Scholz

Oris-Avalon-Airshow-3 — Death-defying stunts and walls of flame – the Avalon Airshow has it all.

Normally you don’t want to be at Avalon airport. It’s a small, out of the way airport full of tired travellers waiting for their delayed flights in cavernous hangers.

All that changes for one week in February when it hosts the Avalon Airshow, the third largest gathering in the world of planes and the people who love them. For that week Avalon is the boys’ toys extravaganza – with more planes (and testosterone) than Top Gun.

Oris-Avalon-Airshow-1 — The heavyweight Globemaster coming in to land.

Also present at the AV gas-fuelled party is Oris, which clearly is partnering with the event because they love and ‘get’ the world of planes. Too often corporate sponsorships are hollow branding exercises, but with Oris that isn’t the case. Peter Borghouts, General Manager of Oris Australia, loves his planes. A lot. When we met him at the show, he enthusiastically extolled the virtues of the RAAF’s new C-17 Globemasters and the sound made by the F/A-18 Hornet (his impression didn’t quite do it justice). He was genuinely excited to introduce the three pilots who make up the Oris Immortals, a trio of aerobatic flyers who do things with planes and walls of flame that had me reaching for the airsickness bag.

Oris-Avalon-Airshow-2 — Jurgis Kairys, Melissa Pemberton and Skip Stewart (AKA the Oris Immortals) show off their wrists with Peter Borghouts, GM or Oris Australia.

I had the chance to have a few words with the affable American pilot Skip Stewart about watches and marketing hype. It boiled down to one question: do pilots actually wear and use watches?

Oris-Avalon-Airshow-Skip-Stewart — Skip Stewart, showing off his Oris Air Racing Limited Edition III.

“Yes, of course they do. When you’re flying – especially the sort of planes we fly – well, most of them don’t have a clock on the instrument panel. People ask: why do you need a watch if you’ve got your phone? Well, if you’re flying across country and doing time-fuel-distance computations, checking winds, those kind of things – you don’t have time to be digging in your pocket. For a lot of the population it’s probably becoming less important, but a pilot will always have a watch on their wrist.”

Oris-Air-Racing-Edition-III — The Oris Air Racing Limited Edition III – perfect for high-G manoeuvres.

And for the record, the watch on Skip’s wrist was an Oris (of course) Air Racing Limited Edition III.

For Oris, which tells us they make “real watches for real people”, partnering at the Avalon Airshow is a great fit. There is an honesty about the airshow that matches the honesty Oris epitomises – everyone is there for the love of planes. There’s a good chance that the guys (and it’s pretty much all guys) who can recite plane model numbers and earnestly discuss the pros of props and the cons of canopies will be interested in the similarly precise world of Swiss watches. And they’re the people Oris wants to be talking to.

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Some past and present highlights from Oris’ Aviation collection.