He had very specific descriptions of who was on the plane, where they sat, etc.

This is actually very common and has been proven in experiments. Please read the research on interviews with children and how suggestible they are. We know a lot more about this sort of stuff since the 1990's. Adults are susceptible to this as well. In this cases, you have the adults not willing to take no for an answer and asking and suggesting over and over again, until the kid comes up with something that fits. The adults are usually completely unaware of what they are doing.

Certain techniques often used by investigators with young children increase the likelihood of false reports, the findings show. One is persistent, repeated questioning over periods of several weeks. When sexual abuse is suspected, children are typically asked the same questions by case workers, police investigators and lawyers, as well as parents, before they testify in court.

But that repetition may lead some young children to concoct stories, according to results of a study by Dr. Ceci and colleagues reported last month at a meeting on emotional memory at the University of Chicago.

In the study of children from 4 to 6, parents helped researchers make a list of two events that had occurred in each child's life and eight that had not. In weekly sessions, the researchers reviewed the list with the child, asking for each event, "Has this ever happened to you?"

One 4-year-old boy, for example, answered truthfully, "No, I've never been to the hospital," the first time he was asked if he had ever gone to the hospital because his finger had got caught in a mousetrap.

But the next week, in response to the same question, he volunteered, "Yes. I cried." And by the 11th week of questioning, he was offering an elaborate tale about his brother's pushing him into the mousetrap, near where his father was getting firewood.

Such accounts were common. By the 11th week, 56 percent of children reported at least one false event as true, and some children reported all the false events as true, Dr. Ceci said.

"The more often you ask young children to think about something, the easier it becomes for them to make something up that they think is a memory," he said.

What is more, the accounts of those false memories are often quite believable. Dr. Ceci has shown videotapes of children recounting both true and false "memories" to more than 1,000 professionals who specialize in cases of child abuse, including lawyers, social workers and psychiatrists.
"The experts are correct about whether the child's account is accurate about one-third of the time," Dr. Ceci said. "That's worse than chance."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuyEUOJuXw0&feature=youtu.be&t=115