Off-duty Alaska Airlines pilot charged for trying to disable jet’s engines during a flight, avoids attempted murder charge

The off-duty Alaska Airlines pilot who allegedly tried to down a packed flight during a bad magic mushshrooms trip avoided attempted murder charges in a grand jury indictment Monday. 

Joseph Emerson, 44, was slapped with one count of endangering an aircraft and 83 counts of recklessly endangering another person – but was spared of another 83 counts of attempted murder originally sought by Oregon prosecutors.

A Multnomah grand jury decided the longtime pilot didn’t attempt to hurt anyone during the meltdown, his lawyer said in a statement. 

Emerson was riding in the cockpit jump seat as a standby employee passenger on an Oct. 22 Horizon Air flight when he tried to activate the jet’s two fire suppression handles — designed to cut the fuel supply and shut down both engines — in the middle of the trip from Everett, Washington to San Francisco, California, authorities said. 

The on-duty pilot and first officer were able to stop Emerson before he could reach the controls and the flight crew restrained him until the plane safely landed in Portland, Oregon. 

“You need to cuff me right now, or it’s going to be bad,” Emerson told them, according to a police officer who interviewed the flight crew.

He was arrested at the gate where he told police he was suffering from a days-long mental spiral and had not slept in 40 hours after taking psychedelic mushrooms with friends during a weekend getaway. 

Emerson said he could not tell if anything was real life or a nightmare and believed he might actually be in hell. 

“I thought it would stop both engines, the plane would start to head towards a crash, and I would wake up,” Joseph Emerson, 44, told The New York Times in an interview from the county jail in Portland last month. 

He texted friends that he was having a mental breakdown and messaged his wife that he “made a big mistake.”

Inside the airport detention room, Emerson stripped naked, tried to jump out a window, urinated on himself and masturbated — all in hopes he would be jolted awake.

“If this is real, and all of that was real, then I have done something to me that is unfathomable,” he told cops.

Once he finally came down from the trip — five days after consuming the mushrooms — he said he was “horrified” that his actions on the plane put lives at risk. 

Emerson has also been charged in US District Court and has a hearing Wednesday. 

With Post wires