notorious case was crossing over the philippines or, sorry, indonesia, there was a volcano, and the ash rose, and the plane filled the smoke, the four engines blew, it dropped dramatically. mercifully, the pilot was able to restart three of the four engines and land the plane safely, so this is not to be taken lightly at all, jon. again, we don t really have any sense of when it will be safe to fly, but there s a complete backlog of people at heathrow waiting to go over places and another reason that people worry about this ash is that it can really sandblast the wind screens of plains up there. planes up there. jon: and no real options for these people. it s not like they can go to another airport across town, they re just stuck, huh? they re stuck, and i think they re having a hard time finding hotel rooms. our colleague, mike tobin, is stuck in london this evening, he was on his way home from
volcanic eruption shot 500 million tons of volcanic ash into the air. that ash rose in a huge vertical column that went straight up for 15 miles. and then it started drifting. it started spreading around the globe. by lunchtime the ash from the eruption was raining down in significant quantity on the city of spokane which is 250 miles away from mt. st. helen s. within two weeks that ash cloud that rose that day had traveled all the way east across the united states all the way across the atlantic ocean all the way across europe all the way across asia and had started to come back around the other side of the world. that ash cloud had circled the globe within 15 days. and what happened in the air is so massive and so hard to get your head around. the ash and the way that it traveled has become sort of the indelible image of what that eruption was like 35 years ago today. but for the communities very