IWC Schaffhausen, the luxury Swiss watch manufacturer, continues to draw inspiration from the life and times of aviation adventurer and author Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

IWC drew on the author's novel 'Vol de Nuit' as the inspiration for a limited IWC watch last year.

This year it is Saint-Exupéry's work 'Courrier Sud' that has provided the source of creativity for IWC's latest homage to this talented and charismatic individual.

The Pilot's Watch Automatic Edition Antoine de Saint Exupéry features a relief engraving on the back, which outlines the geographical range of operations in Saint-Exupéry's era.

Its production will be limited to the historical number 1,929; the year of the novel's first publication in Paris.

Schaffhausen have also sponsored a permanent exhibition of Saint-Exupéry in co-operation with the heirs to the late aviator's estate in the largest French aviation museum, the 'Musée de l'air et de l'espace' in Le Bourget, near Paris.

Some of the exhibits have never before been on public display, even including part of the wreckage of his Lightning aircraft recovered from the seabed.

Saint-Exupéry was not only an adventurous aviator, trail-blazing his way across new flying routes in canvass-skinned biplanes, but he was also a talented writer with a poetic feel for the human condition, capturing his thoughts and insights in best-selling works that appealed to both adults and children alike.

Saint-Exupéry met his untimely death, aged just 44, in the final months of the Second World War. It is perhaps somewhat fitting for this spirited pilot that he died doing what he loved best and that his last flight remains shrouded in mystery.

On the night of July 31, 1944, he took off on a reconnaissance from the island of Corsica. He was never seen again.

Sixty years passed before investigators from the French Underwater Archaeological Department confirmed that the twisted wreckage of a Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter aircraft, found on the seabed off the coast of Marseille in 2000 was indeed Saint-Exupéry's, but the cause of his crash remains a mystery.TradeArabia News Service