[imagesource:sfist/facebook]
Joseph Emerson made headlines in 2023 when he tried to shut off the engines on an Alaska Airlines flight while bombed out of his mind on magic mushrooms.
Emerson, who was off-duty at the time, was sitting in the cockpit’s jump seat during a flight from Seattle to San Francisco and allegedly attempted to shut off the plane’s engines by pulling the engine fire handles.
Fortunately for everyone on the aeroplane, the two pilots managed to subdue the crazed pilot and the plane, which was rerouted to Portland, landed safely.
Emerson, who had allegedly taken psychedelic mushrooms about 48 hours before the flight, said during a recent interview that he “had trouble deciphering what reality was” while on the drug, which he claims he took after a weekend of “remembering his best friend Scott”, who died a few years back.
“What I thought is, ‘This is going to wake me up, I know what those levers do in a real aeroplane 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.”
He says that he texted a friend about his mental state, and the friend texted back about doing breathing exercises. But the text was read aloud to him into his headset, which apparently increased his sense of unreality, and he ripped his headset off.
“And then, as the pilots didn’t react to my completely abnormal behavior in a way that I thought would be consistent with reality, that is when I was like, ‘This isn’t real. I need to wake up,'” Emerson says.
The 30 seconds of madness has now all but destroyed the pilot’s career, who was taken into custody as soon as the plane landed. Emerson was charged with 83 counts of attempted murder, 83 misdemeanour counts of reckless endangerment and one felony count of endangering an aircraft.
Talk about a bad trip.
[source:people]
