If you saw a white substance streaming away from your airplane's wing after takeoff, what would you do? Figure it's just a weird air thing and ignore it? Keep an eye on it?

Or would you rely on your background as a NASA aerospace engineer, where safety is an everyday issue, and realize it was time to flag down the flight attendant?

NASA aerospace engineer Rumaasha Maasha made choice No. 3 on a flight out of Huntsville, Ala., and that's why he's being praised for quick action in a bad situation.

Maasha, who works at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, was on a commercial flight out of Huntsville International Airport in January when he noticed the oddity outside. And when you say "noticed" in reference to an engineer, it's an entirely different level of noticing. Listen to Maasha tell the story.

"Normally, if it's a humid day, you'll see vortices, or circular patterns of rotating air, off the wing," Maasha told NASA public affairs staffers, who released his story this week. "About 1,000 feet off the ground, I started seeing something white and thought, 'maybe we're just hitting some humidity.' Well, then we banked to turn cross-wind and it was still doing it, and that's when I knew something was up. I looked closer and immediately realized that we were losing fluid."

Not only did Maasha know what he was seeing, he knew why. A vent valve was malfunctioning, and he also knew what it meant. As the plane flew faster at higher altitudes, the "Venturi effect" would increase suction on the tank. The leak would speed up.

"I quietly motioned to the flight attendant to come over and fortunately she was very attentive," he said. "She called the crew and the key thing is that she did this as we were still climbing out. Within a minute or two, they reduced speed and leveled off. The fuel leak diminished immediately when they slowed down."

The plane returned to Huntsville to the tune of "groans and moans from passengers," NASA said. But when word spread of the situation, Maasha made a lot of new friends.

Maasha is a 14-year NASA veteran, but he goes back even further with airplanes. He lived near an airport in Monrovia, Liberia as a boy and was fascinated by flying. Maasha's father was also an engineer, and both parents were university professors.

Maasha enrolled in Columbia University in New York - at age 15 - to earn a bachelor's degree in engineering mechanics. He followed that with a master's in aerospace engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. He worked for airlines while looking for an engineering job and earned another degree and a private pilot's license.

Today, Maasha works on NASA's Space Launch System at Marshall in Huntsville. His specialty is structural dynamics, and he recently helped test a key part of the big, new rocket that will take astronauts back to the moon and into deep space.

"Looking back, I guess I had the perfect sets of circumstances to recognize the issue that day," he said later. "Since I was a kid, I've always tried to sit in a window seat near the wing. That's not the first time I've noticed something. I'm sure it won't be the last."