The former Alaska Airlines pilot who tried to shut off the engines of a passenger airplane mid-flight last October during a hallucinatory episode says he's "better for it."
"I'm better for it, which is kind of a weird thing to say, but I am really better for all of us," Joseph Emerson told ABC News in an interview that aired Friday.
"At the end of the day, I accept responsibility for the choices that I made," he added.
Emerson, 44, had taken psychedelic mushrooms the week before the incident. He said he suffered lingering side effects for days and, during a flight from Everett, Washington, to San Francisco, Emerson said he started to lose track of reality.
"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 told ABC. "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."
He tried pulling the red handles that would have turned the plane's engines off midair, likely killing all 83 people on board. But pilots apprehended him and cuffed him.
"There was a feeling of being trapped, like, 'Am I trapped in this airplane and now I'll never go home?' " he recalled.
Emerson has pleaded not guilty to 83 counts of attempted murder, 83 counts of reckless endangerment and one count of endangering an aircraft.
The murder charges have been dropped.
"At the end of the day, I accept responsibility for the choices that I made. They're my choices," Emerson said. "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."