Former Alaska Airlines pilot who tried to shut down engines in-flight shares his story

Joseph Emerson, a former Alaska Airlines pilot, calls it the biggest mistake of his life.

Emerson was inside an Alaska Airlines cockpit last October when he raised his arms and pulled two large red levers that could have shut down both engines, at 30,000 feet. He calls the incident the worst 30 seconds of his life.

Ten months later, he is now grateful for those moments: They've saved his marriage, allowed him more time with his kids, and thrust him into a life of therapy, recovery, and the launch of a new non-profit designed to help other pilots struggling with mental illness.

Now Emerson and his wife, Sarah, are describing that incident, and the anxious, challenging months that followed, in an interview with ABC News.

"I made a big mistake."

Emerson sent his wife Sarah a text message on Oct. 22, 2023, moments after he was removed from that cockpit and just before he asked a flight attendant to handcuff him.

"I made a big mistake," the message read.

Sarah Emerson replied: "What's up? Are you ok?"

"I'm not," Joe Emerson replied.

That was the last time Sarah Emerson heard from her husband for days. She immediately tracked his flight and learned it had diverted and made an emergency landing in Portland.

Sarah knew little of what happened for 24 hours. It wasn't until a jail receptionist told her that she learned her husband had been charged with 83 counts of attempted murder – one count for every soul on the aircraft.

"I walk up to the window and say I'm looking for my husband and he kind of just looked on the computer and typed some things in and then nonchalantly tells me the charges, and I lost it," Sarah Emerson told ABC News. "I screamed and I keeled over, and I almost fell. They grabbed me and pulled me over because I know what that means. I was in a complete shock."

What happened

Joe Emerson had been struggling over the death of his best friend, Scott, a pilot who died while on a run six years earlier. Emerson had been away for the weekend with friends, celebrating and remembering Scott.

On Friday night, the group took psychedelic mushrooms – a drug that can make you hallucinate and typically has effects that last a few hours. Emerson said that for him, the physical side effects lasted days, and the consequences a lifetime.

Something wasn't right

As a friend drove him to the airport, Emerson said all he could think about was being home with his family, but a deepening fear that he would never make it began to overtake him. It intensified as he took his jump seat inside the confined cockpit of the Alaska Airlines jet.

"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, in an interview near his home in California.

Emerson said the feeling increased – and with it, a belief that "this isn't real, I'm not actually going home … until I became completely convinced that none of this was real," Emerson said.

As the Alaska Airlines plane headed toward San Francisco, Emerson said his condition worsened. He reached out to a friend who texted Emerson to do breathing exercises. Instead of helping, Emerson said, the moment when his phone read the text in his ear ultimately pushed him over the edge.

"That's kind of where I flung off my headset, and I was fully convinced this isn't real and I'm not going home," Emerson recalled. "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."

The next 30 seconds would put 83 other lives in danger, end Joe's career, and potentially send him to prison for the rest of his life.

"It's 30 seconds of my life that I wish I could change, and I can't."

"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."

Those levers were the engine shut-off controls.

"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."

How did the pilots respond?

Emerson said as soon as he grabbed the engine shut-off levers, the pilots pulled his hands away. He remembers the pilots' immediate confusion, trying to comprehend what just happened. Emerson also recalled what made him quickly realize his situation was very much real.

"It was really the pilot's physical touch on my hand," Emerson said. "Both pilots grabbed my hands where I kind of stopped and I had that moment, which I'll just say I view this moment as a gift."

Two gifts, Emerson said. The second was that the engines did not shut down but continued to operate normally.

"I observe the pilots react to the difficult situation that I just handed them and watch them react in a very professional manner," Emerson said of the pilots. "I heard them converse about me and I said, 'You guys want me out of the flight deck?'"

The pilots unlocked the cabin door for him, and he "opened the door to a very confused flight attendant," Emerson recalled.

Emerson said he walked into the cabin, drank directly from a coffee pot and took a seat in the flight attendants' jump seat. None of the passengers knew that the man in a pilot's uniform had only moments earlier tried to turn off their plane's engines.

Emerson's episode wasn't over

Emerson's feeling of unreality persisted, he said, and he again felt the need to wake up.

"At some point I thought maybe this isn't real, and maybe I can wake myself up by just jumping out, like that freefall feeling that you have," he said.

So Emerson grabbed another lever – this one operating the cabin door.

"I put my hand on the lever, I didn't operate the lever," he recalled, at which point a flight attendant stopped him.

"She put … her hand on mine again and with that human touch, I released. I think around that period is when I said, 'I don't understand what's real, I don't I don't understand what's real.'"

At that point, Emerson said he asked the flight attendant to handcuff him, and she immediately did so.

"I essentially asked to be restrained myself because I knew if this is real, I've already done enough damage," Emerson said. "I thought, 'Let's restrain me till I can get the help I need.' That's really kind of what I was hoping coming off this airplane that I would get, get the help I needed."

Emerson was taken into custody when the plane landed in Portland. Sarah Emerson wouldn't learn what happened on board until late the next day. She wondered whether her husband had experienced a medical emergency and was in a hospital. She tracked his phone and saw it pinged from the airport.

"I could see that his phone was at the airport. We knew the plane was diverted and so I was wondering, 'OK, is he hurt? Is he sick? What happened?'" Sarah Emerson said.

It was several hours before Emerson's union representative informed Sarah Emerson that her husband was being detained.

"I said, 'What does that mean?' It's just so not the world that I live in, you know. I just didn't even understand what that meant," Sarah Emerson recalled.

Jail, and a way forward

Emerson spent the next 45 days in jail before he was granted bond. It wasn't until Tuesday evening, four days after taking the mushrooms, that Emerson said he regained full clarity.

His jail physician would later tell him that 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.

Emerson also now believes that he's an alcoholic, although he said alcohol didn't play a role in October's incident.

"My substance that I used was primarily alcohol, which is a depressant, to treat a depressive state," Emerson said, adding that he's now in treatment and prioritizing his mental health. He also said he accepts full responsibility for his actions – actions that he said have actually changed his life for the better.

Joe and Sarah Emerson are now dedicating much of their life to building their new nonprofit: Clear Skies Ahead. Their goal is to raise funds for and awareness of pilot mental health, and to emphasize the importance of not being afraid to seek help.

Because pilots who don't meet strict medical requirements can have their license to fly revoked, Emerson said, it's not unheard of for pilots to refuse to admit or seek help for mental health issues.

"Right now, if you raise your hand, not in every case, but there's a perception out there that if you raise your hand and say something's not right, there's a very real possibility that you don't fly again," Emerson said.

Following Emerson's incident, pilot mental health is receiving renewed attention.

"Who would you rather fly with: a pilot who is depressed, or a pilot who is depressed on medication?" said Dr. Brent Blue, a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) senior aviation medical examiner, at a National Transportation Safety Board mental health summit in December.

"And that's what it comes down to. We need to work together to help modernize the system and help the FAA modernize our pilot mental health evaluation program," Blue added.

In May, the FAA expanded the number of drugs approved for use by pilots, including several antidepressants. The agency also says it is hiring more mental health professionals.

"The FAA encourages pilots to seek help if they have a mental-health condition since most, if treated, do not disqualify someone from flying," the FAA said in a statement to ABC News, in part. "In fact, only about 0.1% of medical certificate applicants who disclose health issues are denied. Treating these conditions early is important, and that is why the FAA has approved more antidepressants for use by pilots and air traffic controllers."

Joe Emerson's future

Emerson remains in legal limbo. Though he's no longer facing attempted murder charges, he is still facing more than 80 state and federal charges, including 83 counts of reckless endangerment after prosecutors reduced the charges in December. It's possible prosecutors could offer a plea deal or decide to go to trial later this fall.

"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."

What would he tell the passengers and crew?

What would Emerson tell the 83 passengers and crew onboard that Alaska Airlines flight?

"First and foremost, thank you," Emerson said. "I appreciate that they saw someone in crisis in the back of that plane and that they paid attention to what the flight crew was telling them to do, and they remained calm until we got on the ground."

It's to the crew, however, that Emerson said he owes the biggest debt of gratitude.

"What I did was, something we don't train for, and they handled it fantastic. It's really a result of their professionalism and the way they handled that situation that I'm alive today," Emerson said.

As for whether he'll ever fly again, Emerson said that remains up in the air – and out of his hands.

"Of course I want to fly again. I'd be totally disingenuous if I said no," he said. "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."

"But at the end of the day," Emerson conceded, "if I'm not meant to fly again, I'm not going to fly again."

The New York Times Presents: "Lie to Fly," which airs at 10 p.m. Friday, Aug. 23 on FX, and streams the following day on Hulu.

ABC News' John Capell and Miles Cohen contributed to this report.