A former pilot for Alaska Airlines who was flying on a jumpseat home to the Bay Area from a trip to Washington, who nearly brought down the plane he was flying in due to a hallucination, is taking plea deals in both state and federal court.

Joseph Emerson of Pleasant Hill faced change-of-plea hearings in both state and federal courts in Oregon Friday, stemming from his October 2023 case in which he endangered passengers and crew aboard an Alaska Airlines flight, when he was off-duty as a pilot but flying in the cockpit jumpseat.

Emerson originally pleaded not guilty to charges that included 83 counts of reckless endangerment — 83 counts of attempted murder, for each of the other people on the plane, were dropped. And his state and federal trials in Portland, where the Alaska plane made an emergency landing, have been pending since last year.

As KTVU reports, via Emerson's attorney, he was changing his plea today to guilty to a federal charge of interfering with a flight crew, and no contest to the state charges.

As Emerson has described in interviews, he had been on a camping trip in Washington's Methow Valley with friends, who were together memorializing the death of Emerson's best friend, Scott Pinney, a fellow pilot who had died in 2018. The group had partaken of shrooms, or psilocybin mushrooms, something that Emerson had never done before, and he proceeded to have an adverse reaction that lasted for two days after he'd taken them.

Medical experts believed he suffered from hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD), which can affect first-time users of hallucinogens. The condition makes it difficult to separate perception from reality.

He said he had not slept for 40 hours and still did not feel right when a friend drove him to the airport in Everett, Washington, but he was at that point desperate to get back home to the Bay Area to his wife and children.

On the plane, he entered some sort of panicked and hallucinogenic state. "There was a feeling of being trapped, like, 'Am I trapped in this airplane and now I'll never go home?'" Emerson says. While sitting in the cockpit, he believed he was dreaming. He says he kept thinking "this isn't real, I'm not actually going home ... until I became completely convinced that none of this was real."

Wanting to end the frightened dream he was in, Emerson reached up for two red handles above him which he knew to be fire-suppression handles that cut gas to the engines — a move that could have brought down the airplane. The two pilots were able to wrestle him away from doing this, and sent him to sit in the back of the plane, where he proceeded to drink hot coffee directly from a pot — another attempt to wake up — and then he reached for a handle on one of the cabin doors.

He says that a flight attendant grabbing him jolted him back to reality, and he then asked to be handcuffed, which the flight attendent did.

In jail and finally sobering up, Emerson said he was horrified and confused by what had happened. His wife described him as a stable family man for whom this was completely out of character. But Emerson later discussed in interviews how he had suffered from depression, and he self-medicated with alcohol, and the case brought up the issue of pilots and mental health — with many pilots who fear ever coming forward with mental health struggles, due to the threat of losing their licenses.

Emerson was freed on bond in December 2023, and has been awaiting trial.

Emerson's federal sentencing is still pending. But as CBS News reports, the conditions of state plea are that he will serve five years of probation, 664 hours of community service — eight hours for each person he endangered — and pay $60,569 in restitution, primarily to Alaska Airlines.

Previously: Alaska Airlines Pilot Who Nearly Downed Plane Goes on 'Good Morning America' as He Awaits Trial