Thanks for your colleague's account: I hope it makes the point that a real water landing is not like those drawings on the safety cards.

However, I respectfully disagree with your advice to "riot." Aggression can spread as quickly as panic in a desperate crowd; invariably it makes the situation worse. Calm, authoritative action (not necessarily verbal) gets results without creating a mob that tramples its weaker members. Screaming invectives at a person who is head-injured, in psychological shock, or doesn't understand your language, won't work anyway.

When I worked in mental health I had to physically control people who were psychotic, but gained new perspective after suffering a head injury while working on my house alone.

I lost consciousness (and enough blood to go anemic), may have seized, got up a flight of stairs somehow, and locked every door and window in the house; I "came to" sitting at my kitchen table after night had fallen. This primitive "safety" response could actually have kept help from getting to me, but whatever part of my brain still functioned guided the actions. Would I have become the typical combative head-injury patient if someone had tried to stop me? I'll never know. This was from a mild concussion—no subdural or skull damage. A black t-shirt hid the blood, so I probably looked perfectly normal.