Ex-Alaska Airlines pilot who tried to down flight while on magic mushrooms trip wants to fly again
The ex-pilot Alaska Airlines who allegedly tried to crash a plane while tripping on magic mushrooms while off duty wants to fly again.
Joseph Emerson, 44, said the October incident that initially landed him with 83 counts of attempted murder and brought an end to his career in the cockpit was the biggest mistake of his life.
“Of course I want to fly again. I’d be totally disingenuous if I said no,” the former Alaska Airlines pilot told ABC News in an interview published Friday.
“I don’t know in what capacity I’m going to fly again and I don’t know if that’s an opportunity that’s going to be afforded to me. It’s not up to me to engineer that. What is up to me is to do what’s in front of me, put myself in a position where that’s a possibility, that it can happen.”
In the sitdown interview alongside his wife, Sarah, Emerson relived the horrifying moment he spontaneously yanked down two red levers that could have shut down both engines, at 30,000 feet while he was riding in the cockpit jump seat as a standby employee passenger.
The lifelong pilot previously revealed the crack-up was part of a days-long mental breakdown and paranoia spiral ignited by a magic mushroom trip he took with buddies.
The group had reconnected for a weekend getaway in Washington state to reminisce on the life of their late friend whose 2018 death plunged Emerson into deep grief — which was intensified by the drug expedition.
Still reeling days later — despite the effects of mushrooms only lasting several hours — Emerson believed he could break out of his dream-like trance by crashing the San Francisco-bound plane.
“There was a feeling of being trapped, like, ‘Am I trapped in this airplane and now I’ll never go home?'” Emerson told ABC News.
Feeling helpless, Emerson relied on his knowledge of the plane to try to bring him back down to earth — literally and figuratively.
“There are two red handles in front of my face,” Emerson recalled. “And thinking that I was going to wake up, thinking this is my way to get out of this non-real reality, I reached up and I grabbed them, and I pulled the levers.”
“What I thought is, ‘This is going to wake me up,'” Emerson said. “I know what those levers do in a real airplane and I need to wake up from this. You know, it’s 30 seconds of my life that I wish I could change, and I can’t.”
That’s when the pilot tried to shut off the engines. Luckily, he was thwarted by a quick-thinking crew and he was removed from the cockpit.
But his erratic behavior didn’t stop there — Emerson drank directly out of a coffee pot and then tried to open the cabin door so he could jump out.
He was stopped yet again, but this time he asked a flight attendant to handcuff him until the plane made an emergency landing in Portland.
Emerson was arrested and charged with 83 counts of attempted murder – one count for every soul on the aircraft.
The ex-pilot is no longer facing attempted murder charges, but he is still facing more than 80 state and federal charges, including 83 counts of reckless endangerment after prosecutors reduced the charges in December.
He could be heading to trial this fall, but it’s still possible that prosecutors offer a plea deal.
Emerson’s jail physician ruled he suffered from a condition called hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD), which can cause someone who uses psychedelic mushrooms for the first time to suffer from persistent visual hallucinations or perception issues for several days afterward, ABC reported.
“At the end of the day, I accept responsibility for the choices that I made. They’re my choices,” Emerson told ABC News.
“What I hope through the judicial processes is that the entirety of not just 30 seconds of the event, but the entirety of my experience is accounted for as society judges me on what happened. And I will accept what the debt that society says I owe.”
