Manny Jacinto wears an IWC Pilot's Watches

On a sun-baked flight line, the young pilots of Top Gun crowd in for a phone selfie while one of them grinds out push-ups on the tarmac behind them. Manny Jacinto is in that group, playing Lieutenant Billy "Fritz" Avalone, one of the aviators Maverick picks for the low-altitude bombing run. Jacinto filmed a speaking part. By the time the movie reached theaters every one of his lines was gone, and Fritz had shrunk to a face in the crowd.

The watches on those wrists are IWC Pilot's Watches from the Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor line. IWC supplies the real Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program, the Navy school the film calls Top Gun, and the two SFTI editions used on screen, the Mark XVIII (ref. IW324705) and the Pilot's Watch Chronograph (ref. IW389004), are not sold in stores. You get one by graduating the course these pilots are training to teach. Dressing the cast in them was a way to make actors look like the aviators who actually wear them.

Which of those watches sits on Fritz is not recorded anywhere reliable. The watch writers who catalogued the film spotted the SFTI Pilot's Watch on Bob, Rooster, and Phoenix; Fritz, his part cut to nothing, slipped past them. In the flight-line frame the watch reads clearly on a pilot's wrist, a black-cased flieger with white numerals and no chronograph registers, though the warm light keeps it from naming its exact model. So it stays what the production issued the wolfpack, an IWC Pilot's Watch of the kind you have to earn, on the one recruit the final cut all but erased.