Pairs of Aces- Heuer Autavia 11630 & 11063
11630 GMT
Like the 11630P Diver, this is the second-generation of Automatic Autavia GMT watches, following on from the original 1163 GMT. These watches are instantly recognisable by their bright blue and red bezels, use to delineate between AM and PM. These bright bezels are rotated to line up against the yellow GMT hand to indicate the time in a second time-zone. Heuer referred to the GMT version of it’s Chronomatic movement as the Calibre 14.
The 11630 GMT shares a much of its dial with the 11630P- the only real difference- apart from the script- is that the GMT watch uses white hour/ minute and sub-dial hands, while the Diver version uses bright orange hour/ minute hands and black sub-dial hands.
11063 GMT
By the time we get to 1983, things at Heuer were very different. Jack Heuer was no longer involved with the company, with Piaget/ Lemania now running the show.
We start to see several anomalies in the Heuer catalogs during this time. This watch, for example, is referred to in the Catalogue as a “11630 GMT” and has 11630 marked between the lugs.
However, the case shares many similarities- but is not the same as- the 11063 case, and so to distinguish between the model, this series is commonly referred to as a 11063 GMT. If you’re already confused by the jumble of Heuer reference numbers, this won’t help things.
Autavia 11630 GMT & Autavia 11063 GMT Compared
Case
As mentioned above, even though both cases are marked 11630, they are quite different
Note the thicker sides and shoulders on the “11063″ case (above) as compared to the 11630 (below). The 11063 case has 21mm lugs, 1mm larger than the 11630.
Frustratingly, you can see that even with the correct bracelet end-pieces (above), the bracelet on the 11063 GMT is not a neat fit with the case.
Pushers
The 11063 case above is larger than the 11630 case, although different in style to the “pure” 11063 case used in the Autavia Diver 100. While the normal 11063 case features a cut-out section for pushers on top of the case, that is not what we see here on the “11063″ GMT.
Dial
As with the two dive Autavias, these two GMTs take a very different approach to dial design. The 11063 (above) features an all-black dial with silver raised indexes, while the 11630 also has a black dial, but with lume strips and orange 5-minute segments on the 30-minute register.
There is a second version of the 11630 GMT Autavia which has contrasting white sub-dials, with the all-black version being the rarer of the two.
Bezel
The final difference you notice is the colour of the bezels- a deep blue for the 11063 (below) and a more turquoise blue for the 11630. Extra points if you noticed that the 11063 GMT loses the serif script on the word “GMT”.
