According to a long report by The Wall Street Journal, aviation officials and airlines could learn a lot from Alaska Airlines about how to deal with clouds of volcanic ash. According to experts, the response to the recent eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull could have had a smaller negative impact on travelers and airlines if the system had been better prepared. Alaska Airlines began creating its volcano readiness strategy in 1980, when Washington state's Mount St. Helens erupted, and honed it over the next decades dealing with various eruptions in Alaska. The airline has a set of protocols to avoid disaster and excessive delays, and to preserve machinery (including shrink wrap!), and it even scrambles empty planes to take measurements to help track ash clouds. Read much more, here.