For several decades the threat of volcano ash is affecting. There has not been a clear standard to these airplane engines. There is no clear picture for the aircraft of when to fly across the ash and when to not. Smithsonian institution global volcanism network has studied the issue with the help of Richard Wunderman. The issue of ash has been studied by scientists and engineers during the early 1990.

The study showed the grounded airplane engines were found to be significant during 1990.US Geological survey (USGS) during 1994 showed the problems which had progress which was limited. The limitation was in the instruments given to the pilot which would describe about the ash cloud. The instruments were not even sufficient to say whether the pilot has entered the ash cloud, and how the ash could be filtered from engines.

The need of progress is need for the ash monitoring and it is difficult to predict the ash cloud beginning and ended. A world wide ash monitoring system has been created due to the previous catastrophic incidents due to ash cloud. UN agency named International Civil Aviation Organization is monitoring and giving training about ash cloud. USGS has already given details about the Alaska KLM plane which almost was crashed during 1989.There is a record of at least 1000 incidents happened due to ash clouds from 1970 according to USGS. Despite all these incidents the flight of planes still resumes even when the ash cloud is present.