Three gold jets, one blue word, and a run of 86 pieces. The Annual Edition 2026 says a great deal with very little.
Look at six o’clock: the numeral has stepped aside for three jets in formation, laid out in gold on a dark blue dial, and above them a single word in blue, FLYGVAPNET. That’s the entire costume, and it’s the reason the watch works.
Sjöö Sandström unveils the Annual Edition 2026 this weekend at Malmen Air Base outside Linköping, where the Swedish Air Force marks its centenary. The watch is a Royal Steel Worldtimer in 86 pieces.
The Model Was Already the Right One
Steel bracelet, 24-hour bezel, and a dial that reads as an instrument before it reads as a tribute.
Anyone who knows this catalogue will read the choice of base watch as deliberate. When Watch Professor profiled the brand earlier this year, the pattern was hard to miss: the Landsort 459m came out of work with divers from the Swedish Navy, and the UTC Skydiver was developed with Air Force flying personnel against a list of 35 requirements. Sjöö Sandström starts with the job and designs backward from it.
The Worldtimer is the model in that lineup built for the sky. A second hour hand, tipped with a blue arrowhead, reads against the 24-hour bezel, so the watch keeps two times at once: local time where you’re standing, and the time that flight plans and radio calls run on. Nothing on this dial was added for the anniversary. The anniversary simply found the right watch.
Sjöö Sandström has been an official supplier and Official Watch of the Swedish Air Force since 2011. Fifteen years of that sits behind a release that could easily have been arranged in an afternoon.
Turn It Over
Each piece carries its own reference, SS-1841-WT, engraved alongside the edition number.
The case back is where the occasion lives, and it’s solid steel rather than glass. Engraved into it is the official centenary emblem: a jet climbing away on its own contrail to form the 1 of a stylized 100, the two zeros looping around Sweden’s three crowns, with FLYGVAPNET 1926 to 2026 beneath. Around the rim runs the dedication, and with it the words every collector looks for, One of 86.
It’s a quiet piece of design for something that only the owner will ever see.
Why 86 and Not 100
Every Sjöö Sandström Annual Edition runs to 86 pieces, for 1986, the year Christer Sjöö and Mikael Sandström set up in Stockholm. It’s the brand signing its own name on the back of somebody else’s anniversary, and this year the signature counts twice: Sjöö Sandström turns 40 in 2026. CEO Kristofer Johansson describes a watch that “brings together two important milestones.”
The watches are assembled by hand to order in Stockholm, as they have been since the beginning, so a run like this moves quietly through an order book rather than off a shelf. Last year’s Annual Edition is already listed as sold out.
The formation over Malmen this weekend belongs to everyone standing on the grass. Eighty-six people get to take a version of it home.
All images courtesy of Sjöö Sandström.
