No, apparently, it is not the volcanic ash - stuff coming out of the volcano’s crater on this picture. It could be something less harmful - if you talk about ‘hazards of flying nearby the active volcanoes’ - just a plume of water steam, for example.
Or, it still can be fumes of some ‘nasty acid’ 
Volcanoes and volcano ash clouds, as a factor affecting the flying was a topic in my previous post. Before that July flight mentioned in the post I had little operational knowledge with regard to flying in the environment contaminated by volcano eruption products. As for my real experience, it was ‘nil’.
Yes, I had a chance to go to the ‘volcano-reach environment’ in Russia couple of times, when I was flying with ‘Siberia’ airlines (nowadays it is called ‘S7 Airlines’) just for a short period of time, doing my Tu-154 line captain upgrade training. During that tour to Siberia I made two scheduled trips out of Novosibirsk to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Kamchatka Peninsula region. But ‘all was quiet then’
It was an amusing coincidence, as shortly after the July flight marked by the first encounter with ash clouds, I was casually browsing the POPULAR SCIENCE magazine one day, and bumped into an article concerning the modern methods and systems for keeping ‘an eye on the volcanoes’.
In the article there was also a short briefing into the problem’s history, with an account of one memorable flight that occurred on December, 15, 1989, when the KLM’s 747 had just barely avoided a crash, having restarted two of the planes’ four engines that stopped in flight after the 747 ’skirted the edge of an ash plume’ over Alaska.
Perhaps, that article was a sort of prompt to start learning more from ‘vulcanology’ because in August we had some more ash plumes in the sky over the Western/ Central Canada.
(to be continued..)
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