Monica Barbaro wears an IWC Pilot's Watches

In the flightline still Paramount released from Top Gun: Maverick, Monica Barbaro's Phoenix does push-ups on the tarmac at golden hour, the landing gear of a Super Hornet filling the frame behind her, a black pilot's watch on her left wrist. The film reached theaters on May 27, 2022, three years late after the pandemic, thirty-six years after Tony Scott's original, and went on to earn 1.5 billion dollars, the biggest hit of Tom Cruise's career and the largest Memorial Day opening on record. Barbaro plays Lieutenant Natasha Trace, an F/A-18F pilot and the only woman among the graduates called back to compete for the strike mission. Cruise designed a three-month boot camp for the young cast, aerobatics in an Extra 300L and conditioning for g-forces, and then they rode the back seats of F/A-18Fs with Navy pilots at the controls while camera rigs recorded every grimace.

Her watch is one civilians cannot buy. IWC has partnered with the Navy Fighter Weapons School, the real TOPGUN, since 2007, and the partnership includes two editions reserved for graduates of the Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program: the Pilot's Watch Mark XVIII Edition SFTI, reference IW324705, and a chronograph version, IW389004, each carrying the school's patch at nine o'clock on the dial. Monochrome Watches identified the film's young pilots, Phoenix, Bob, and Rooster, as wearing the SFTI models. In the push-up frame, the watch on Barbaro's wrist shows a clean case with no chronograph pushers on a fabric strap: the three-hand Mark XVIII, the same model Lewis Pullman's Bob wears. Maverick himself stays outside the program; Cruise wears the black Porsche Design chronograph his character carried in 1986.

The watch did not go back to the prop department. Barbaro told Vanity Fair in 2020 that Cruise gave her one when filming ended: 'Tom very generously gifted me the watch that my character wore in the film: a Pilot's Watch Mark XVIII TOP GUN edition Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor from IWC Schaffhausen.'