At six o'clock on this openworked dial there is a small cage, turning slowly and endlessly, and the most remarkable thing about it is what you cannot see: there is nothing holding it down from above. It seems to float there, spinning in its window with no bridge crossing over the top of it, as if suspended by magic. This is a flying tourbillon, and that floating quality is the whole point of it, the feature that gives this rare white-ceramic Royal Oak its drama and its name. To understand why it is special, it helps to understand what a tourbillon is in the first place, and then what the word flying adds.
The tourbillon was invented at the dawn of the nineteenth century to solve a real problem. The timekeeping heart of a mechanical watch, the balance and escapement, is affected by gravity, and when a watch sits for long stretches in one position, gravity pulls slightly differently on that delicate oscillator and introduces tiny errors into its rate. The ingenious solution was to mount the entire escapement and balance inside a small rotating cage that turns continuously, usually once a minute, so that the assembly is constantly being carried through every position. The errors that gravity introduces in one orientation are cancelled by the opposite errors in another, and over a full rotation they average out toward zero. It is one of the most beautiful ideas in all of watchmaking, a mechanism that defeats gravity not by resisting it but by endlessly turning through it, and watching the little cage revolve is one of the quiet pleasures of horology.
In a traditional tourbillon that spinning cage is held top and bottom, pinched between a lower bridge and an upper one, the upper bridge arching over the cage to steady it. The flying tourbillon does away with that upper bridge entirely. The cage is supported only from beneath, cantilevered on its lower bearing alone, engineered so precisely that it needs no support over the top at all. Removing that upper bridge is genuinely difficult, because the whole delicate assembly must be balanced and secured from one side only while still turning smoothly, but the reward is purely visual and quite magical: with nothing crossing over it, the tourbillon appears to float, spinning free and unobstructed, open to the eye from above. On a watch built entirely around showing off its mechanism, that unobstructed, floating view is exactly what you want, and it is why the flying tourbillon and the openworked dial belong together so perfectly here.
And openworked this watch emphatically is. The dial has been cut away almost entirely, skeletonised so that you look straight through the face into the heart of the movement, its bridges and wheels and springs all laid bare. What makes this example so striking is the colour: the skeletonised bridges are finished in a deep, vivid blue, an electric cobalt that turns the exposed mechanism into a piece of graphic art, the blue structure framing the silver-white wheels and the ruby jewels and the floating tourbillon at the bottom. Skeletonising a movement to this degree is painstaking work, because every bridge that remains must be cut back as far as it can go while still holding the mechanism rigid, and then each tiny surface must be bevelled, finished, and here anodised that brilliant blue, all by hand. The result is a face that is all depth and transparency and colour, the mechanism not hidden behind a dial but made the dial, lit up in blue.
Then there is the case, and it is a feat in its own right, because this Royal Oak is made of white ceramic. Ceramic is prized for being extraordinarily hard, essentially scratchproof, and colour-fast forever, but white ceramic is the hardest of all to make well. The white colour leaves nowhere to hide: any impurity or unevenness shows, the material must be fired to an immaculate, consistent brightness, and then this substance harder than steel has to be ground and brushed and polished into the Royal Oak's exacting alternating finishes, the satin surfaces meeting mirror-polished bevels along every crisp edge. Doing that to white ceramic, across the case and the full integrated bracelet, is one of the most demanding things a watchmaker can attempt, and the payoff is a Royal Oak of a cool, bright, pure whiteness that no metal can match, a watch that will keep its flawless white surface and sharp edges for a lifetime. Against that bright white case, the blue openworked dial glows all the more intensely.
All of it lives in the shape that has defined luxury sport since 1972, Gérald Genta's Royal Oak, the octagonal bezel with its eight exposed screws and the integrated bracelet flowing seamlessly from the case. To render that icon in white ceramic, open its dial to reveal a blue skeleton movement, and set a flying tourbillon floating at its foot is Audemars Piguet operating at the very top of its craft, and the watch is made in the tiniest numbers, a limited edition of just fifty pieces worldwide, which places it among the rarest expressions of the model.
That is what makes this watch so special. It gathers three feats into one object: a flying tourbillon that floats unsupported in its window, endlessly turning to average away the pull of gravity; an openworked movement skeletonised and anodised a vivid blue so the whole mechanism becomes the dial; and a case and bracelet of pure white ceramic, the hardest of all ceramics to perfect, worked to the Royal Oak's crisp finish. Limited to fifty, it is a watch where the engineering, the artistry, and the material are each extraordinary on their own, and where together they produce something that floats, glows, and dazzles all at once, with the effortless authority of the design that started it all.
