I was asked to run a 'team building' (yeah I know, useless but can be fun ....) exercise once for a company I worked for. The dozen or so participants were not pilots, but all involved in the airline industry. The task everyone was given was :
You are the captain of a large commercial aircraft flying from Cape Town to London with 300 passengers on board. In the small hours of the morning, over northern Nigeria, a warning light tells you of an imminent failure in the fuel supply from a wing tank. This means that should the supply from that tank become restricted, you won't have enough fuel to get to your destination nor to return to your departure point.
You need to make a decision as to the best course of action and make an appropriate announcement to the passengers. For the purpose of this exercise, you can assume that you can safely land your aircraft, and fly it out again, from any airport on or close to your flight path.
I have the transcripts on my laptop ........ they varied from :
"We're going to run out of fuel if we don't do an emergency landing so we will be landing soon to have the problem fixed." (hopefully this person was not really taking it very seriously!)
to :
"A warning light has indicated a possible malfunction in one of our multiple fuel systems. This is most likely a false alarm but is one of those things where we take no chances. In the unlikely event that it does fail, the back up systems would allow us to continue flying safely for several hours, but we've contacted the airport authorities in Kano and have arranged for a ground check to take place when we land there in about 20 minutes from now. No cause for alarm, I'll keep you informed and meantime I'm handing you over to the cabin crew for the normal pre-landing procedures. My apologies for the disturbance to your rest, and we'll be on our way to London again as soon as possible. Thank you."
That last one was from a female member of my team who ended up in a very senior customer facing position for a major carrier.