“We were lucky! The single carbon dioxide charge released by the engineer extinguished the fire in the engine. Number 4 was feathered and began to cool but our troubles were far from over. The engineer had manuals and technical orders spread out on all sides of him and was working feverishly to restore some power to number 4, as the indicated air speed dwindled from 168 to 166 to 164 or 5, hovering precariously above the deadly stallout at 163. We were only a few miles from north of the center by this time but no one had recorded the data. We were too busy worrying. The pilot was in the process of putting the plane into a long glide to increase the air speed, when the left scanner claimed the interphone circuit with, ‘Black smoke and flame coming from number 1.’ This time we _were_ in real trouble. However, the engineer had anticipated further difficulty and was ready again. It was only a matter of seconds before the fire was out and some semblance of power had been returned to number 1. But we were still five hundred miles from the nearest land and very near the center of a granddaddy of hurricanes. So we declared an emergency and headed for MacDill Field.” Altogether, this was an ironical turn of affairs. An old plane had acted like a lady the day before and now a new one had frightened the crew with its mechanical troubles, but the newer methods of hurricane hunting, the “tricks of the trade,” had fortunately taken some of the danger out of the storm itself. Otherwise the mechanical troubles might have combined with the weather to spell disaster. _12._ TRAILING THE TERRIBLE TYPHOON “_The workshop of Nature in her wildest mood._” —Deppermann So far as anyone knows, the most furious of the typhoons of the Pacific are no bigger or more violent than the worst of the huge hurricanes of the Atlantic and the West Indies. They belong to the same death-dealing breed of storms, but the typhoons come from the bigger ocean; they sweep majestically across these vast waters toward the world’s largest continent; and to the south and southeast lies a longer stretch of hot tropical seas than anywhere else on earth. Perhaps it is the enormous extent of the environment that explains the fact that in the average year there are three or four times as many Pacific typhoons as there are West Indian hurricanes. The greater excess of energy generated in this enormous Pacific storm region by hot sun on slow-moving waters is evidently released by a more frequent rather than a more violent dissolution of the stability of the atmosphere.