As the volcanic ash drama spread across Europe, some unlikely web celebrities emerged as passengers and curious onlookers to the crisis scrambled to visualise its impact.
Step forward the wonderfully garage band feel of flight data and map mashups such as RadarVirtuel, FlightRadar24 and Casper.
The trio are probably three of the best known websites in Europe that combine aircraft movement data from air traffic control or private receivers with a Google Map.
During any normal day sites such as these would be the preserve of aircraft fanatics and the curious.
But with a volcanic ash cloud looming overhead in Europe and thousands of flights being cancelled, stranding passengers around the world, suddenly a map showing which aircraft would dare to go near the no-fly zone or were the last in a particular region, suddenly became enormously popular.
FlightRadar24 in particular was singled out a number of times in the mainstream media to demonstrate the impact of the cloud on air services.
Casper, a Netherlands-based service which launched in 2009 to track flights in and out of Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, says its traffic increased ten-fold during the crisis.
RadarVirtuel, which also plotted a shadow on its map to indicate the location of the ash cloud based on meteorological reports, comments that it needed another two extra servers to cope with the sudden demand.
The third site of the trio, FlightRadar24, also need to quickly plugged in additional servers to add some much needed capacity. It says around 100,000 people were on the site when the first flight returned to Heathrow on Tuesday 20 April.