i was working in perth, in west australia, and that aircraft was due to come in and of course it was all in the newspapers then and a big problem. i started looking at satellite data, the kind of images you've probably been seeing there in the news reports, and i figured out a way to discriminate the ash from normal meteorological clouds, ice and water clouds. so that turned out to be quite a useful breakthrough and i wrote a few papers. but not many people paid much attention. then there was another incident in 1989, a klm, 747 300 flew into an ash cloud, and that brought a lot more attention and then people started using my algorithms and we thought, well, wouldn't it be good if we had this on an aircraft. so we designed an instrument to look forward from an aircraft and see the ash cloud, just like a radar would work. but it's been difficult to get acceptance. >> and why is that? i mean if you look at the statistics here, nearly 500 airports on this planet are within 100 kilometers, what's that, 60 miles or something, of volcanos that are either erupting right now, putting ash in