it's been a long time since I posted about Jimmy Stewart's speed record setting P-51, but a new article about it brought up a thing about it, and aircraft, that I've never read about, cloud seeding. Astonishing that it won the '49 Bendix cup, and then, was used for iodide burning cloud seeding experiments to prevent hail damage to crops

air racer Joe De Bona, who along with Stewart and famed woman pilot Jacqueline “Jackie” Cochrane, had shared ownership of the craft, had flown it in the September 1949 Bendix 2,008-mile trophy race to a win, averaging 470 mph. Cochrane also flew competitions and set international and national speed records with it.

On Sept. 1, 1954, Stewart sold the plane to De Bona. And on June 23, 1955, that aircraft was being flown by a former World War II pilot, smashed into Duncan’s family pasture because the pilot wanted to avoid crash landing on one wheel at an airport, he didn’t want to risk firefighter’s lives or his own by trying land it... and decided to fly up side down long enough to jump out and get clear before the plane nose dived into the farmer's field. 

farmers and ranchers in eastern Goshen County and their state representative and senator were asking for the hail suppression flights in 1955, the Casper Tribune-Herald reported on March 2, 1955.

Jim Duncan recalls the plane as it was his ranching grandfather and dad along with other area farmers and ranchers had recruited James Cook as part of a test of whether silver iodide could help prevent the loss of sugar beets, dry beans, corn and alfalfa due to hail each year, through the experimental and controversial use of an airplane burning silver iodide to seed thunderhead clouds and stop hailstorms in eastern Wyoming and western Nebraska in 1955

Duncan said Cook would fly into thunderclouds and seed them with the silver iodide with the purpose of producing rain and not hail.

State Engineer L.C. Bishop said the Nebraska group had signed a contract with area farmers to seed clouds in the Wheatland-Guernsey area to reduce crop damaging hail, on the ground, farmers and ranchers fired up their propane-fueled silver iodide burners to seed clouds from the below as well.

Interestingly, there was controversy, as cloud seeding gave other farmers a scapegoat to blame for a drought: The Casper Tribune-Herald reported on Aug. 23, 1954, that the Wyoming Weather Modification Board ordered the Valley Hail Suppression Association of Morrill, Nebraska, to stop cloud seeding after 228 Wyoming farmers protested that the efforts had led to southeastern Wyoming’s drought that year.

https://cowboystatedaily.com/2025/08/16/jimmy-stewarts-legendary-p-51-was-banned-in-wyoming-and-crashed-in-nebraska/