Cirrus SR22 Perspective and Ladies Watches

On Saturday, I had the pleasure of spending a lot of time in a Cirrus SR22 Perspective aircraft. I enjoyed checking out all of the features and noting the differences between this glass cockpit (which is similar to the Garmin G1000) and comparable aircraft, such as the Cessna 400. We talked previously about some of the new features of the Perspective, and I’ll go into even more detail soon.

Call me crazy, but as fun as airplanes are, I always find the people in aviation even more interesting. That was true with Juice Welch, the demo pilot who brought the airplane up to Palo Alto, CA from southern California. Interestingly, I’d previously read about Juice...

in an April post on AV8RDAN”S World of Flying blog. Dan spent a couple of days with her and wrote a great article about her, which I highly recommend.

One of the interesting things about Juice is that besides being a Cirrus Design employee, she’s also an entrepreneur. When I asked her about this she said “Oh, I was always the one with the lemonade stand.” Now in her twenties and having moved beyond lemonade, her latest venture is designing and selling watches designed for women pilots. With perhaps only 6% of all pilots being women, you might think this is a small market, but it looks like she has it all to herself. Smart lady!

She told me that she was sitting around with a group of lady pilots and they were complaining that they couldn’t find any aviator watches designed for women. All they could find were large clunky ones designed for men. Juice was interested in a lady’s watch too, so she started researching watch companies around the world that could build a custom design for her. Initially she planned to buy just a few watches for herself and friends, but then the light bulb went off. Maybe one could build a business selling watches to women pilot’s everywhere! Hence Abingdon Watches was born.

Here's an example of the Jackie watch strapped to Juice’s arm. My Nikon out did itself--just click on the picture for what's probably the best picture on the internet of this beautiful watch. The outer dial is like the portion of an E6B computer that is used to do time, distance and fuel burn calculations. There’s a certain irony that this watch wearer is a demo pilot for the Cirrus SR22 Perspective which can do those calculations instantly, but I digress.

If you’d like to learn more about these timepieces and perhaps buy one for yourself or the lady pilot in your life, visit www.abingdonwatches.com.  And the next time you run into a Cirrus demo pilot on the west coast, ask to see her watch!