Originally Posted by
VTcharter
Although normally, passenger observations of a system abnormality will be incorrect however they may not be. I try to remember that the pax are part of my "resources" (CRM) and their input may be just as important as a crewmembers. On top of that, you never know the background of your passenger...pilot, engineer, manufacturers rep, FAA. They may have some valid input so ignoring them and hoping that they go away is probably not the wisest move.
Pax saved me from having to declare an emergency and rollin the trucks.
When calling to FA to see if she was ready for T/O she said a passenger made her promise that she would tell us fluid was pouring out the #1 on the Dash 8. The Fluid level was still ok but we remembered we had it filled before push. So we watched it for a min and sure enough we were bleeding somthing fierce.