Pilot Joseph Emerson talks trying to down plane during mushroom trip

The off-duty pilot who allegedly tried to down a max-capacity plane is finally speaking about the bizarre incident — claiming he thought he would snap out of a mushroom-trip-induced delusional state if the flight crashed.

“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 where he’s being held on 83 counts of attempted murder.

The life-long pilot claims he was experiencing a days-long mental breakdown and paranoia spiral that left him wondering whether what he was experiencing was real or simply a dream when he carried out the Oct. 22 act.

Emerson’s crack-up started two days earlier when he took magic mushrooms with friends during a weekend getaway to reminisce on the life of one of their late friends.

The friend’s 2018 death had plunged Emerson into a deep grief that left therapists encouraging him to seek medical treatment for depression, which he steered clear of out of fear Virgin America’s strict guidelines against such prescriptions would ground him from flying.

Instead, he chose to self-medicate and tried the hallucinogenic for the first time, which only kickstarted a week-long episode.

Emerson began feeling a deep unease and a sense his friends were teasing him and potentially plotting to hurt him.

“I felt fearful of them,” he said, adding that he also “started to have this feeling that this wasn’t real.”

“I thought of a lot of traumatic things in that time where I was like, ‘Am I dead? Is this hell?’” he said. “I’m reliving that trauma.”

Emerson made his way to the airport, where his sense that he was in purgatory only grew stronger. He felt that nothing made sense, such as the directions his GPS gave him and the way the flight attendants boarded the plane.

He texted a friend, stating that he believed he was having a panic attack.

Pilots noted he seemed to grow increasingly agitated during the hours-long flight from Washington to Oregon, until he finally snapped.

“I’m not OK,” Emerson said before scrambling to activate the jet’s two fire suppression handles midflight while he was sitting in the cockpit — designed to cut the fuel supply and shut down both engines.

The pilots snatched his wrists and wrestled him away from the controls, with Emerson ultimately asking a flight attendant to restrain him until the pilots could make an emergency landing.

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

Emerson continued acting erratically and chugged coffee straight from the pot until an attendant stopped him.

He asked the staff whether things were real or if he was in a nightmare and tried reaching for the emergency door, thinking that if he jumped he would wake up.

“I’m having a mental breakdown and tried to turn off both engines on my flight home,” he wrote in a text to friends, writing to his wife in another: “I’ve made a big mistake.”

Emerson was arrested upon the emergency landing, but continued asking whether his conversations with the officers were real.

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

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.

He repeatedly asked his wife over the phone “Is this real?” and would break out into song mid-conversation.

It was not until five days after consuming the mushrooms that Emerson was ripped back to reality.

“I am horrified that those actions put myself at risk and others at risk,” he said.

“That crew got dealt a situation there’s no manual, checklist or procedure that’s been written for. And they did an exemplary job keeping me and the rest of the people on that plane safe.”

Emerson is being held without bail on the state charges, one for each of the lives that were on the plane during his psychotic break.