The Rolex GMT Master was designed as an aviator watch and it carried that branding theme right from the beginning. Even if you see the earliest adverts and commercials, you will clearly notice it being advertised as aviator’s choice.
The special thing about Rolex GMT Master Watch was its fourth dial. This new addition was unprecedented in the watch making industry before Rolex GMT Master Watch. This extra hand allowed display of additional time from another city or even time zone. It is really the choice of the owner. The watch has an outer bezel to make two different times possible on the same watch.
Although the GMT has been abolished by aviation industry as their standard time zone and now they use UTC, Rolex GMT Master Watch has maintained its brand name. The aviators set UMT instead of GMT on their Rolex GMT Master watches.
It was Pan Am that initiated the development of Rolex GMT Master. The pilots were going longer routes and had to keep track of GMT along with the respective time zone. The problem was that the time zones were changing more than once during long routes. This asked for a watch that can let pilots set two different time zones on their watches one of them being the GMT always. Pan Am motivated Rolex to come up with the Rolex GMT Master Watch. Since then, it has become a standard in aviation industry.
When you buy a new Rolex GMT Master Watch, you have to set its time first using different hands. In fact, the watch has four hands including a Red GMT hand as an extra perk. You will also have to set bezel.
These settings are easy. In fact, the Minute, Second and Hour hand are set the regular way as you do with all the other watches. However, when it comes to setting the bezel and the Red hand, some users face certain difficulty. If you read the manual careful, you will understand that Rolex wants to let the user choose what to do with these two hands. If you want to keep it the way it was meant to be, then you should set the Red hand and bezel for GMT and set the current time zone using the other three hands. However, if you need to set any time zone other than GMT, you can easily find a table with differences in different time zones relative to GMT.