On examination of the aircraft after the battered crew had let down at home base, it was found that the control cables were permanently loosened, the skin on the bottom of the port elevator fin had been cracked away from the fuselage, one Plexiglas window was bowed inward, and the paint was removed from the leading edges. Because of the violence of turbulence on this flight, the nervous crew of the second recco plane on that day was instructed to reconnoiter but not to try to go into the center. On the fifth of September a violent typhoon formed between the Philippines and Palau and moved northwestward toward Formosa. On the tenth a recco plane ran into trouble in this storm. Twice while flying at two thousand feet, it met severe downdrafts, losing altitude at five hundred to one thousand feet per minute while nosed upward and climbing at full power. The eddy turbulence was extremely severe and most of the crew members became sick. The second recco plane on that date ran into violent turbulence also, and at times it was almost impossible for the pilot and co-pilot to keep the plane under control. And then disaster struck! By the end of September the Navy storm hunters had gone out on one hundred missions into the hearts of typhoons and, although many of them had been frightened and badly battered, there had been no casualties. They made up a report as of September 30, commenting on their phenomenal good fortune on these many flights. But on the very next day, October 1, one of the crews which had been making these perilous missions departed on a flight into a typhoon over the China Sea. Those men never came back. No one had any idea as to what had actually happened, but the members of other crews could well imagine what might have happened, and whatever it was, it must have ended in typhoon swept waters where none of the storm hunters expected to have any chance of survival. It could have happened in the powerful winds around the eye or in one of those bands extending spirally outward from the center, filled with tremendous squalls and fraught with danger to brave men venturing into these monstrous cyclones of the Pacific. The report—even before this sequel—had stressed the hazardous nature of reconnaissance. In these Pacific missions, the pilots and aerologists, even without radar, had become aware of the doughnut-shaped body of the storm with squall bands spiraling outward (the octopus arms). But they got very little information that they thought would help in predicting the movements of typhoons, except the old rule that the storm is likely to continue on its course unchanged, tending to follow the average path for the season. The explorations by aircraft as a means of getting data were far more useful in locating storms and determining their tracks, however, than any other methods.