Walker then strides out of his office to the nearby hangar that houses his two airplanes, small craft built in the 1970s. But he trusts them to take him straight into storms that periodically darken the skies of this flat, agricultural area ~200 miles west of Dallas. "I've cut my head quite a few times being bounced off the ceiling [of the plane]," Walker said. "It can be pretty rough." But the bumps and bruises are the cost of doing business. Walker's company, SOAR, or Seeding Operations and Atmospheric Research, is paid to make it rain. Or, more accurately, to make it rain more than it would otherwise through a process known as cloud seeding.