Well I've been in the aviation industry since joining BOAC Associated Companies in 1969.
What this incident illustrates, as well as many other incidents over the last 12 months, is that the industry has created and is now confronted by a very serious problem.
It seems to have become accepted and normal for cabin crew and handling staff to regard their customers, aka passengers, as a homogenous bunch of fools with an IQ of 50, who are there to be herded and disciplined, under the ever-present threat of offloading if they argue the toss.
This appalling attitude is seen at its most prevalent in the locos, but the legacy airlines, especially BA in Europe, cannot claim to be immune.
I have upbraided someone in another thread who seemed to think it is acceptable to deny boarding to people who "struggled to understand" the basic physics of flight, and then to "chuck them on a later flight, when the problem arose from the carriers stupidity in the first place.
I shudder when I hear passengers referred to as "pax", usually by someone who clearly has a very limited grasp of the basics of aviation, let alone of customer service in an airline context.
It is this attitude that leads cabin crew to scream at an intelligent passenger who sees fuel cascading from a wing to just "Sit Down!".
The airline's pathetic efforts to persuade the passenger who raised the alarm not to be too critical tell us all we need to know about that airline.
It is high time that cabin crew and handling staff are taught that 95% or more passengers understand the technicalities of flight extremely well, and recognise ridiculous bull**** immediately. Indeed, many passengers understand these things a lot better than the average cabin crew, in the UK at least.
So, let's have a little less arrogance from cabin and handling staff and rather more acceptance that if a passenger has a concern, it should be considered very carefully, because the passenger concerned might well know a lot more about flight than they do.
Above all, we have to stop training passenger and handling staff that they can treat passengers like a herd of sheep, and threaten them with off-loading and worse at the slightest sign of dissent.