LTN Phobia

He certainly should not have been rude about it but also, maybe there is an element of under-recognition of the nuisance that your son may have caused by disturbing other passengers (or at least this swearing one) for 1.5 hours of a 14 hour flight by referring to it as "only" 1.5 hours?

For all you know, swearing may even have been a semi-automatic reaction to being woken up by the noise as he was falling asleep? Maybe it was also a long-awaited flight in F for this passenger and he was angry about having his flight "partially ruined" by being disturbed by the noise, or trying to work and being distracted by the noise?

Whatever that may have been, while it does not justify his conduct, we need to put ourselves in other people's position a bit in various situations, even if it galls us to do so, or even if the other person is in the wrong in some respect (i.e. in this case, the guys should have had more tolerance and certainly shouldn't have behaved that way, but also, recognising that the trigger to his behaviour was noise disturbance from your son).

It does not justify the behaviour of the passenger in any way, shape or form, but it is something that should be borne in mind that noise can be quite annoying for others, particularly in a confined space. People normally grit their teeth and put up with unpleasant situations even if it partially ruins their experience (or in some cases entirely ruins their experiences) but this guy obviously didn't, for whatever reason.

Many people choose to fly premium class (or some employers choose to put their staff in premium class) so that they can either work, sleep or rest in flight and I suspect there is a higher chance that people would hold more grudges against the noise disturbance in premium classes than in economy class, partially because it can stop them from achieving the aim of flying in premium class (whether that be productive work or sleep, or to relax), whereas not many people choose to fly economy class instead of other classes for better sleep or more productive work.

One approach to solving the issue could have been even to apologise to the person for the disturbance caused by the noise, although it makes it hard to do so when they are being rude like that. If he was swearing loudly, then perhaps he wanted you to hear it so that you'd recognise that the noise was annoying him but did not want to ask you to keep the noise down, and if that was the case, approaching him could have eased the situation. To me what he did was a wrong approach (for a start, I assume swearing so loudly would have annoyed other passengers, which if I were on board would probably have triggered me to approach him to stop swearing loudly, which I have done on a few flights).