The Alaska Airlines Attack
I had a request to do another aviation story recently. As luck would have it, one popped up on Monday when an off-duty Alaska Airlines pilot decided to try to kill everyone on board his flight. I’m not sure that there was a connection between the request and the incident, but I also can’t be sure that there isn’t. Who knows what awesome powers my readers might be tapped into, but let’s be careful what we ask for.
Let’s start at the beginning. Alaska Airlines Flight 2059 is a regular flight from Everett, Washington (KPAE) to San Francisco (KSFO). This flight was operated by Alaska’s regional codeshare partner, Horizon Air, and was flown with an Embraer 175 regional jet, an airplane that resembles a baby 737 but is typically configured for between 76 and 88 passengers.
In the interest of full disclosure, I fly another Embraer product, the Legacy 500, in my corporate aviation job. The two planes are both manufactured by the Brazilian aerospace company and are both sometimes referred to as “jungle jets,” but they are completely different types and I have never been trained on the 175.
On Sunday, an off-duty pilot was commuting in the cockpit of the airliner when the pilot-turned-passenger, in the words of Alaska’s official statement, “unsuccessfully attempted to disrupt the operation of the engines.”
The crew, the statement continues, “quickly responded, engine power was not lost and the crew secured the aircraft without incident.”
“Following appropriate FAA procedures and guidance from Air Traffic Control, the flight was safely diverted to Portland International Airport,” Alaska says. “The jump seat occupant [the perpetrator] is currently in custody and the event is being investigated by law enforcement authorities, which includes the FBI and the Port of Portland Police Department.”
The FlightAware track for the flight shows a 50-minute flight with a cruise altitude of 35,000 feet. The flight is just south of Portland, Oregon (KPDX) when suddenly the plane begins a descent at a turn back to the north. Based on this depiction, it appears that the attack took place at about 6:26 p.m. Pacific Time.
The first question that many readers will have is why an off-duty pilot was in the cockpit of an airliner in the first place. The simple answer is that he was on the way to work. He was scheduled to fly a 737 trip out of San Francisco later.
Many airline pilots don’t live at their base. Airlines extend free or low-cost travel benefits to their employees provided that the seat is not taken by a paying customer. At the companies I used to work for, this was called “non-revenue space-available” travel. Usually, it was shortened to “non-rev.”
Pilots have an additional privilege called “jump-seating.” Airline cockpits contain a small foldout seat called a jumpseat where an additional occupant can sit inside the cockpit perched behind and between the two pilots. The jumpseat is intended for check airmen to observe the crew on line checks (observations of a routine airline flight to ensure compliance with standard procedure), but the vast majority of the time, it goes unused. If the cabin seats are full, sometimes pilots commuting to or from their base are allowed to sit in the jump seat. If you’ve seen the movie “Catch Me If You Can,” you’ve seen the general way that jumpseating works.
ABC News reports that the suspect was en route to San Francisco to work. The flight may have been full in the back so he had to ride on the jumpseat. For some reason, as yet undisclosed, he tried to pull the airplane’s throttles back and cause a crash.
Reuters adds that the suspect tried to engage the engine fire suppression system. This is a key detail because most fire switches on jet airplanes do several things. The goal of pressing the switch is to stop a fire so it cuts off several items that could add fuel to a burning engine. These include closing shutoff valves for the fuel and hydraulic systems and removing electrical power from the engine. Additionally, engine fire extinguishers are armed, and bleed air valves are closed to prevent fiery hot air from moving to other parts of the plane.
The fire switches are always a guarded switch with a cover that has to be opened before you can press it. Why? Because pressing the switch cuts off a running engine, which is almost always a bad thing in an airborne aircraft. I say “almost” because there are certain times, such as when an engine is on fire, that shutting the engine down is preferable to keeping it running, but these are rare occurrences.
The fact that the suspect flipped up a protective cover to try to press these fire switches and shut off the engines says a lot about his intent. He wanted to crash the airplane and kill everyone on board.
I’ll add that if the engines were shut down, they could be restarted, but under the circumstances, it is likely that there would have been a disaster. Restarting the engines is a complex procedure. That’s especially true if both engines are shut down, which would require the crew to maintain control of an airplane that is quickly losing energy. In this scenario, with a suicidal passenger in the cockpit trying to make you lose control, the odds would not have been good for success.
The suspect in custody is Joseph David Emerson, 44. Numerous outlets report that Emerson was (I assume that it’s past tense by now) a pilot with Alaska Airlines. No motive has been named, but there are several obvious possibilities.
The new Hamas war has brought rumors of terrorist strikes in the US and there have been “homegrown” terrorist attacks by self-radicalized American terrorists in the past. There is so far no evidence that Emerson was a radical Muslim, and the FAA said that the incident does not appear connected to world events.
Far more likely is that Emerson was homicidal/suicidal for personal reasons. Back in 2015, I wrote an article about pilot suicides for the now-defunct Examiner.com which is still available on my blog. A number of airline pilots have chosen to end their lives by taking their passengers and fellow crewmembers with them. Notable examples of crashes that are known or suspected to be the result of suicidal pilots include Germanwings Flight 9525 in 2015, EgyptAir 990 in 1999, Japan Air Lines 350 in 1982, Malaysia 370 in 2014, and China Eastern Airlines 5735 in 2022.
Interestingly, this isn’t the first time that a suicidal employee has targeted Horizon Air. In 2018, a disgruntled mechanic stole a De Havilland Q400 turboprop airliner and performed an impromptu airshow before crashing it into an island in Puget Sound. Only the hijacker was killed in that incident.
There has also been at least one case of a cockpit jumpseater attacking the crew in the flight. Back in 1994, a jumpseater on a FedEx freighter attacked the crew with hammers, a knife, and a spear gun that he had carried on board in a guitar case. The crew fought back and ultimately subdued the suicidal hijacker, a FedEx flight engineer, with the help of aerial maneuvers that made it difficult for him to stay upright.
Through the years, I have also seen rumors that at least some of the September 11 hijackers were in the jumpseat, but I have never seen this confirmed. Nevertheless, the entire industry response to hijackings changed after those attacks. Those changes included strengthened cockpit doors and more stringent security measures for jumpseaters.
New measures also included the Federal Flight Deck Officer and Federal Air Marshal programs. FFDOs were pilots deputized to carry guns to protect their airplanes. The fact that Joseph David Emerson, 44, is still alive to see 45 is evidence that no FFDO or Air Marshal was on board Alaska 2059.
As to why Emerson would try to kill himself and a planeload of passengers, I can only speculate. Previous motives for pilot suicides have included mental illness, job pressures, and family and financial problems. Airline flying can be stressful and the current work environment is one that can include a lot of time away from home and exhausting schedules. Airline jobs are notoriously rough on marriages and can lead to what is sometimes termed as AIDS, “Aviation-Induced Divorce Syndrome.” This, in turn, can lead to financial problems.
Back in August, a United Airlines pilot was arrested after assaulting a parking lot gate with an ax at Denver International Airport. CBS News reported that the pilot told sheriff’s deputies that he “just hit his breaking point.”
The Daily Mail reports that Emerson was the married father of two boys who seemed to be the perfect father and husband. Still, personal strife can be difficult to diagnose from next door. The Mail also reports that Emerson lives with his family in Pleasant Hill, California, a San Francisco suburb, so it wasn’t clear why he was flying to San Francisco from Everett, but the answer to that question might provide a motive.
The incident seems to have been handled discretely at the time. It isn’t clear if any passengers or law enforcement officers traveling on the flight helped to subdue and restrain Emerson, but there have been some indications that it may have been a momentary lapse on Emerson’s part rather than a determined attack. Passengers told ABC News that they were told that there was a “disturbance in the cockpit” and that Emerson had suffered a “mental breakdown.”
“It was very professional, handled very calmly, and we didn’t really know what was going on until we landed,” passenger Alex Wood said.
Emerson now faces 83 counts of attempted murder and a host of other charges. It may be fortunate that he snapped when he did rather than later as a crewmember at the controls.
This was all disturbing to hear about, and it was the first news story on when I got in my car yesterday, ironically at the airport. I’m a bit of a nervous flyer and these kinds of incidents always give me the heebie jeebies. I am actually pretty proud of myself for just having done 4 flights in 5 days so I could go to my brother’s wedding in Germany. All of them went really well, with the possible exception of an aborted landing at my final stop yesterday, that seemed to happen after we had already touched the ground, which is not something I had ever experienced before. The captain was pretty reassuring about it but no explanation was given as to why it happened. We just circled back around then the next time landed as normal.Report
I was on a plane that had a last second landing abort at Lambert in St. Louis. We were nearly on the ground, then we climbed really steeply. We never heard boo, but I assume there was another aircraft on the runway. It’s the most scared I’ve ever been.Report
That thought hadn’t even crossed my mind and now I’m feeling lucky to be alive.Report
This happened to me, landing (well, almost landing) at LAX; the front wheels touched down, and then we pulled up sharply and circled the airport. No crew said anything, and my fellow passengers seemed unconcerned, but I was terrified.Report
Thanks for the writeup — I’d only seen the headlines didn’t quite understand what was going on, but this clarifies it well. Given that you have some subject matter expertise here, do you think this was just an example of the system working, or are there changes that could be made for better protection whose drawbacks wouldn’t outweigh the benefits?Report
I don’t think the system worked here at all.
The perp slipped through the cracks and somehow got in the jumpseat when his mental state shouldn’t have allowed him near the cockpit.
We really don’t have much of a system to guard against this sort of thing. Pilots self-report mental problems (and many other medical problems as well) while the backup system is for their fellow employees to report them to the company or the union’s professional standards reps.
It’s a difficult problem to solve. No one really wants more FAA intrusion into personal matters and commuting pilots need access to jumpseats, but those are the most obvious answers.Report
“I don’t think the system worked here at all.”
“We really don’t have much of a system to guard against this sort of thing.”
So it seems more like the latter than the former, insofar as a non-existent system can’t be expected to work.
If you could design a system to try to prevent or minimize the risk of such events, what would it be? Mandatory psychological testing of some kind?Report
Someone asks you to do an aviation story, and this happens. Please stop writing about House Republican leadership.Report
Kids: Don’t Do Drugs.
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Also, kids, don’t give mushrooms to pilots.
I don’t know about you, but I’d have no idea how to get my hands on magic mushrooms for the first time. And I definitely wouldn’t have my first experience in a cockpit. It makes the “first time” part of the story hard to believe. But maybe he got high then went to the airport and got on a plane while tripping? That suggests a weakness in the system.Report
“I haven’t slept in 40 hours” tells me that the dude should have called in sick.
There are states where Magic Mushrooms are legal and Warshington is one of them (so is Colorado, for that matter).
I’m guessing that it’s like weed. If there aren’t official establishments where you can purchase a bag, you can talk to a guy who knows a guy and buy some without getting hassled by the cops.
And now it seems likely that your therapist is the guy who knows the guy who knows a guy.Report
I think even if certain items are legal, there are some jobs – like ones where the lives of passengers depend on your judgement and reflexes and general connection to reality – where they’re forbidden everywhere for use immediately before doing that job. This guy had at least three things going on where he should not have been in that cockpit, especially if the report I heard he was deadheading* down to LA to fly a plane himself is true.
I haven’t flown in over 20 years and this does not make me any more inclined to.
*heh. Deadheading. because he took magic mushrooms.Report
The guy definitely needs to be locked up. (I don’t know about 83 life sentences or anything like that.)
But he’s absolutely proven to be a danger to himself and others.
Let’s hope he gets the help he needs.Report
I’d also say there is a substantial deterrence message that needs to be sent.Report
I feel like required treatment plus probably losing his pilot’s license is sufficient. I don’t think he needs to be locked up in prison, but definitely have rehab be made a requirement of avoiding stricter sentences. If the passengers want to sue Alaska for “pain and suffering” or whatever, that’s something they can try.
And yes, this definitely needs to end up as a “hey airline* employees? Don’t do this” message
(*also train engineers, bus drivers, etc., etc.Report
Also it seems he was suffering major depression. That can induce suicidal ideation. Compound a depressive episode with narcotics like psilocybin, and maybe the dude decides checking himself out is the least bad option he’s got to resolve whatever problems look bigger than they actually are. Maybe the drug makes him, for lack of a better word, sort of forget that there’s eighty-three other lives on the plane he’d be taking along with his own. Or something like that. I’ve never used psilocybin to experience what it does to cognition.Report
Well, from some light googling, it doesn’t look like it’s as easy to buy mushrooms as it is to buy weed. I mean, when I google, “where do I buy weed in Denver”, I get a half-dozen shops within a mile of I-70 and Colorado.
When I google “where do I buy mushrooms in Denver”, I get a bunch of “grow your own” stores and a handful of places that sell non-psychedelics (Lion’s Mane mushrooms appear to be a thing? Friggin’ hippies).
Wait. I should google Seattle (now the cops are going to come to my house…) and… yeah. You can get a bag from a dispensary off of Queen Street.
The guy who sold him the bag should have said “if this is your first time, make sure you have a good co-pilot”. And, heck, the guy who took them for the first time should have asked “Do I need a co-pilot?” and concluded “HELL YES I DO”.
Jeez louise.
I mean, don’t do drugs.Report
They’re legal to possess and consume here, and I think to grow for personal use, but not to sell commercially. Our “full legalization” is only for microdoses in a a clinical setting, with the theoretical clinics subject to a licensing scheme to be devised later.
But if you subscribe to the model of “What’s legal is determined by what the cops actually do on the street, not what’s written on the books,” here’s the reality: a company from BC came to NW Portland and opened up a storefront selling actual magic shrooms and had lines around the corner for a solid week before the cops did anything about it. Pretty brazen.
But yeah, especially if you’re going to be in the cockpit of an airplane in the very near future, don’t do drugs.Report
Fascinating and disturbing story but an excellent write up. Well done.Report