Quiet Birdmen

Today, the club's membership, organized into regional "hangars", is made up primarily of retired airline, military and freight pilots, as well as a few astronauts.

In January 1921, a subset of that group, some ten to twenty aviators, began meeting fairly regularly on Monday nights in New York City at Marta, an Italian restaurant located at 75 Washington Place in the Greenwich Village neighborhood.

The attendees that night were Harry Bruno; S. H. MacKeon; Wallace James; Richard R. "Dick" Blythe; Earle D. Osborn; Charles S. "Casey" Jones; Harold T. "Slim" Lewis; Ernest Loftquis; Paul G. Zimmerman; Donald Mcllhenny; Ladislas d'Orcy; Richard H. DePew Jr; George Hubbard; Robert B. C. Noorduyn; John (Jack) Bishop; and J. E.

[1] Unusually, a former combat foe was invited to join the club: Ernst Udet, the highest-scoring German flying ace to survive World War I.

Currently there are 277 Hangars, formed independently and exist in Akron, Ohio Washington DC, Cleveland, Atlantic City, Wayne, San Francisco Bay Area, California, Los Angeles, Palomar in San Diego County, Oxnard/Santa Barbara, Fresno, Santa Ana, Long Beach, Palm Desert, Rhode Island, Ocala, Seattle, North Cascade in northern Washington state, Milwaukee, Fort Worth, Amarillo, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Columbia, Hilton Head and Greenville, Daytona Beach, Honolulu, Kalamazoo, Lansing, Boise, Hartford, Rockford, Akron, Indiana, Syracuse, Las Vegas, Cincinnati, Tampa Bay, Orlando, Melbourne, Venice, Stuart, Jackson, Knoxville, Wilmington, Greensboro, New Orleans, Cape Cod, Kansas City, Austin, Dallas, San Antonio, Buffalo, Rochester, Binghamton, Fort Smith, Chicago, Jackson Hole, Boston, Somerville, Hilton Head, Anchorage, Hagerstown, Denver, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Allentown, Reading, Atlanta, Waterloo, Tulsa, Shreveport, Colorado Springs, Salt Lake City, Pensacola, Trenton, Bangor, Maine, Portland, Oregon, and other cities throughout the US, Alaska and Hawaii.

The leather-bound book has 160 pages and 640 photographs of Quiet Birdmen including portraits of Jimmy Doolittle, Wiley Post, Roscoe Turner, Walter R. Brookins and Ephraim Watkins "Pop" Cleveland.

[6] Another QB book was donated to the National Air and Space Museum by Arthur Raymond Brooks; it contains photographs of the members of the New York hangar and a description of the history and by-laws of the club.

On a rainy Monday night, June 5, 1967, the Houston hangar of Quiet Birdmen met at the Skylane Motel on Telephone Road in Pearland, Texas.

Fellow astronaut Gordon Cooper was there, and so were two U.S. Air Force reservists who had just been invited to their first QB meeting: Major William "Bill" Hall and Lieutenant Colonel Francis "Fran" Dellorto.

[15][16][17] In Ventura, California, on a Monday night in October 1974, Ben Rich gave a talk to the Oxnard and Santa Barbara hangar of Quiet Birdmen about the Skunk Works program at Lockheed.

Beat wrote in his book So Many Ways to Die: Surviving As a Spy in the Sky that this was the first time any of his friends or family had heard of that part of his past—he had faithfully kept the government's secrets to himself.

[18] Beginning in 1971, rancher and aviator John S. "Jack" Broome, a founding member of the Oxnard hangar, held an annual private airshow and barbecue for the Quiet Birdmen at his ranch in Camarillo, California.