That was NASA's DC8 Desert, it's quite a well known story and yes, did a lot of expensive damage. All the instrumentation carried was "in-situe" stuff: nephelometers, cloud particle imagers and the like.
The instrument that press release is about uses forward looking IR to detect ash from a different signature to other aerosol, or background sky. It works - the only problem is that it can't see through cloud, which is a bit of a limitation.