“There’s a stigma that pilots are infallible”: Aviation’s mental health paradox endangering us all

When Joseph Emerson, an off-duty pilot aboard Alaska Flight 2059, was taken into custody in Portland, Oregon after seemingly trying to switch off the plane’s engines while it was 30,000 feet in the air, Carmen García Durazo was only a few miles away. 

This was in October of 2023. Now, less than a year later, the team at “The New York Times Presents” has rolled out “Lie to Fly,” a new documentary film — for which Durazo serves as director — on FX and Hulu that structures a broader investigation into pilot mental health around Emerson’s story.

For several years before his in-flight episode, Emerson had been silently grieving the death of his close friend and fellow pilot Scott Pinney. Though Emerson was struggling mentally, he hesitated to seek medical treatment — doing so would mean he’d have to disclose his situation to an aviation medical examiner (AME) during a routine check-in. If he was deemed unfit to fly, he could be grounded for months — leaving his wife and two children to live off of only one salary in the interim.

Instead, during a grief retreat with Scott’s father and a few friends, Emerson tried psychedelic mushrooms. The experience, which Emerson found to be deeply overwhelming, ultimately led to existential fears on the flight a few days later. While sitting in the jump seat, Emerson grew restless and anxious, leading him to believe, “this isn’t real, I’m not actually going home . . . until I became completely convinced that none of this was real,” per what he told ABC News in a recent interview. Then came his frightening actions, which saw him subsequently charged with 83 counts of attempted murder: one for each passenger and crew member on board the Alaskan Airlines flight. 

Though Emerson is no longer charged with murder — he is now charged with one count of endangering an aircraft and 83 counts of recklessly endangering another person — “Lie to Fly” reveals how his mental-health predicament is not an original or isolated case. Less than a month after Emerson was arrested, he spoke to The Times’ Mike Baker about the incident. For Durazo, that conversation “honestly raised more questions than it answered,” prompting her to delve further.

“Perhaps this isn’t a story about one man who had a struggle one day on an airplane. Perhaps there’s a bigger system involved here,” she told Salon.

“It’s a way of telling a bigger story and it’s a way of interrogating a system,” Durazo added, referencing the Federal Aviation Administration’s stringent and largely outdated guidelines and policies around pilot mental health.

Check out the full interview with Durazo, in which she discusses the “delicate dance” of approaching sources who have been through tragedy and broader public misconceptions of pilots’ perfectionism. 

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you first come upon Joe’s story and what was your reaction as a director but also as someone just as a news consumer?

I think it’s funny because I approached it the story from all of those angles, but also like the unplanned landing in Portland is in my backyard. So in addition to the headline about like an emergency landing in a plane . . . the fact that this one was happening a few miles from my home immediately caught my attention, just because the first instinct that comes up is like, “This is something out of the ordinary, something aberrant or abnormal must have happened.”

So right away my curiosity is piqued there just as a resident I suppose. And it’s not until more trickles of information started pouring out in dribs and drabs that I started to wonder, “What’s the bigger story here, and what actually happened?” So I think that engaged the natural curiosity again, just as a resident, then as a journalist. And then Joe, as people will see in the film or if they were following the story immediately after that event in October, as his charges were pending, he was immediately obviously taken into custody and held awaiting the grand jury. So again, I just had this feeling of, “He’s so close to me, and the person who could probably answer all of these questions that I have is just a few miles away.” 

The access question is always very tricky just because there’s a lot of celebrity-authorized stuff, a lot of people are savvy about wanting editorial control, which we do not allow. So fast-forward a few more weeks later, Mike Baker — who’s the national reporter for the New York Times who’s based in Seattle — published a story that was the first long-form interview with Joe when he was still incarcerated. So this is prior to his release. And that interview — both the print and online story and then later the full audio, which I was able to listen to — honestly raised more questions than it answered, which again makes my documentary spider sense tell me that there’s something even bigger going on. Perhaps this isn’t a story about one man who had a struggle one day on an airplane; perhaps there’s a bigger system involved here. And the reason I say that is because Mike’s interview with Joe revealed someone who was very calm, very logical, very intelligent. It seemed — from listening to him speak — very aware and competent. And basically, when you read the first headline of this person threatening the lives of 83 people on an aircraft you think, “Oh my god he’s crazy,” right? And I think Mike’s article revealed someone who was certainly not and also planted seeds of doubt with regards to how this one individual existed within a system, meaning the broader aeromedical system and how that impacted the decision-making that happened that day.

So that’s all of those questions that were simmering for me, for the folks at The Times, for Mike Baker, certainly for FX and Hulu, as well our network partners. And so we started the slow process of approaching Joe and Sarah, his wife, about potentially — if they were open to an interview, if they were open to giving us the larger story. And within those stipulations that I mentioned. Like, they can’t control anything.

Joe Emerson in The New York Times Presents “Lie to Fly” (FX)So what was your pitch to Joe? How did you officially get him to sign on and how did you get that access?

You know, it’s a really delicate dance. I think the short answer would be through a lot of very careful and patient and I like to think empathetic outreach. From what I understand, the family was getting a lot of media outreach because this was covered all over the place. It’s kind of a ripped from the headlines, tabloidy story if you treat it as such. So basically Mike  Baker, I think first of all with his very measured article, had gained some amount of trust from the family as it was very thoroughly and accurately reported. And so that was step one. Step two was then brokering an intro with — again because Joe is incarcerated at this point so it was very difficult to speak to him for obvious reasons logistically. So he’s speaking with his defense lawyers, understanding what the legal questions that were remaining, and again there were plenty of them. And also speaking with Sarah, Joe’s wife who was, when he was incarcerated, the real protector obviously of the family.

And it was a series of very long involved conversations during which part I was mostly listening. I think a huge part of gaining their trust was listening to them and not dictating what we thought the story was. There weren’t any demands for their participation. It was just really being there to understand as they were processing in real time what was happening. So yeah, a lot of really careful and measured conversations, which were mostly listening on our part at first.

What would you say your intention was in making “Lie to Fly”?

It changed. When the first instinct started kicking in and the questions started kicking in, my biggest intention after having conversations with the family and with his [Joe’s] lawyers and with Mike Baker, my biggest takeaway was that the public doesn’t understand the real story. Because again, even locally — this happened in my backyard — there were people calling him “The Mushroom Pilot.” There were people saying, “He deserves to be in jail,” there were people saying all sorts of things, passing judgment on what I knew at that point was not the real story. And so part of my driving ambition as a filmmaker, but also as a person is to get the story right. And I was hearing from people – who are very well-informed, very educated people in my orbit even socially – things that were just not true. Especially after having spoken to the family, so many things that I understood to be so completely off the mark that I thought it could be a public service to almost bring to light the real contours of the story as I knew them.

What were some of those things?

Well, some of those things were that Joe was crazy, that he was on mushrooms [on the plane] which he wasn’t. That he deserved to rot in prison. That, in general, we shouldn’t let depressed pilots fly planes and stuff like that. And I was just kind of like, “Huh, I think on its surface I understand why people had those reactions.” I think you hear 83 counts of attempted murder and most people think that should be avoided at all costs. So those were some of the misconceptions.

As we started reporting, we were reaching out to more aviators, reaching out to more people on all sides of the aviation world. So we have pilots, we have flight attendants, we have flight crew, air traffic controllers during that process. It was this really eye-opening moment of scores of people who, for very good reason, didn’t want to go on the record because they had similar concerns that Joe expressed. Obviously, his circumstances demanded that he make those public, but a lot of people we spoke to within the aviation world didn’t see him as a villain. They saw him as a “There but for the grace of God go I” story. And that scared me. I mean that again made me realize, “Oh my God — this might be bigger. It’s bigger than Joe for sure, but it also might be bigger than people realize because of the reasons not to come forward with any kind of mental health concern.”

In the U.S., men make up the majority of pilots. How would you say that gender plays into the issues of mental health for pilots specifically?

I don’t really know. I’ll have to think about that. Definitely in our reporting, we found more pilots who were male, and I think what we also found in talking to those people is that a lot of these folks with families have organized their lives around the fact that the husband — if it’s a married, cis couple — is the breadwinner. And that this person is going to be away, out of the house, nearly constantly on the road, and thus is the main breadwinner for the family, which basically makes that position that much more vulnerable if they disclose a mental health concern and then are grounded and their income is halved or taken away.

A cockpit seen in The New York Times Presents “Lie to Fly” (FX)I remember Sarah mentions in the film how Joe’s disclosing of his struggles to his AME would have more than likely resulted in him being grounded for a minimum of half a year. And she said something like, “We just couldn’t do half salary with two kids.”

Yeah, they organize their family life such that her main role is to take care of the house when he’s gone, and that’s a big job first of all. And it’s also not easy to change those circumstances on a dime if you’ve been a career pilot for however many years, right?

Joe takes psychedelics when he’s on a grief retreat. How did you approach representing the role of drugs in the film?

That’s such a good question because it’s such a huge reason why a lot of people are interested in the story, because of all the big money and also the fashion of psychedelics coming into play as a way to negotiate grief. So we started really by educating ourselves and speaking to all the experts in the film. We had a former John Hopkins academic who studies this stuff, and he was a really great resource but he was by no means the only one. We spoke to local people here at OHSU (Oregon Health and Science University), Dr. Aryan Sarparast, who studies brain plasticity and how psychedelics affect that. So we approached it first understanding what the science is and how often this could affect someone. Is it common? Is it not, etc.? And what we found in that research too was that it wasn’t obviously solely the psilocybin or the psychedelic components — it was that, compounded with untreated and unchecked grief for however many years.

And so it’s funny. This is such a big part of the story — “this” meaning psychedelics — and the more we dug into it a lot of those psychedelic experts were telling us, “Yeah but the bigger part of the story is this unchecked and untreated grief. That is how this can have this compounding effect.” So ironically that experience took us back to the main part of the issue which is, “How do we take care of ourselves in a way such that we are not susceptible to psychotic breaks like this?”

In the aftermath of Joe’s mental health episode, he’s hit very hard by the media and the greater public. What misconceptions do you think people still have about him?

I think the biggest misconception is that his actions that day were solely the actions or solely the ripple effects of an individual and not of the greater results of a system that might need some investigating. It became clear that the decisions that he was making were because of a system and it became very clear that the decisions he was making that a lot of people criticize — when you actually write them out on paper — are very logical responses to very real pressures. That sort of logic is more compounded by — again, a lot of the folks that didn’t make it on screen that we talked to who echoed those exact same concerns. So yeah, I think now the current misconception is that he was a lone wolf acting alone. And the biggest underpinning to that is that he is part of a system and a symptom of a system.

What misconceptions do you think people have about pilots in general, and what would you say are the social implications of those misconceptions?

This is from speaking to a lot of pilots, there’s a stigma that pilots are infallible. That pilots have to be perfect and physically fit and mentally — completely like a calm sea. And again, we do want physically and mentally fit pilots in the cockpit, this is not to argue that we want unfit folks in the cockpit. This almost double-edged sword of perfectionism that we associate with that profession in particular, I think is a bit outdated. 

In a time where airline safety feels more precarious than ever, how should we be thinking about pilots and their mental health? How should we be thinking about passenger safety?

I think we should be thinking about pilot mental health — and this is echoed a few times in the film — but the question isn’t “Do we want depressed pilots flying planes?” It’s, “Do we want depressed pilots flying planes who are treated for that or untreated for that?” And that is the operating question here. In terms of passenger safety, I think for all of the drama, for lack of a better word, that occurred on that flight, the impeccable instincts and behavior of the flight crew, the flight attendants and the pilots ensured that there was no loss of life and there was nobody actually hurt on that plane. Just really respect your flight crew is something that I would always advise, and you’re going to get to where you’re going safely. And even though there are all of these stories recently of aircrafts malfunctioning and passengers being unruly and things like that — statistically air travel is safer than it’s ever been. The question that we’re posing with this film is, “How do we ensure it stays that way with tools that we do have at our disposal?”

Dr. Alan Hauser and Dr. Anne Suh, John Hauser’s parents in The New York Times Presents “Lie to Fly” (FX)There’s a really emotional segment of the film when we’re with the parents of John Hauser, a 19-year-old aviation student from the University of North Dakota who ended up taking his own life. His parents share his suicide note with the viewers in which John very explicitly asks them to “get the FAA to change their rules on pilots seeking help with their mental health.” What were the challenges in asking Dr. Suh and Dr. Hauser about such a difficult experience?

The challenges were just the enormous emotional and ethical concerns about not retraumatizing people, not profiting off of people’s pain. That relationship was treated very delicately. I reached out to the Hausers earlier in the year — always with the spirit of, “We’re collecting and gathering information about this story that we know for better or for worse you unfortunately have a lot of really deep experience with.” And so this outreach is very like, “Please let us know if you want to talk. We’re not going to pressure you or follow up incessantly or anything like that.”

That was a really delicate relationship that we worked on for weeks, and we did gain their trust. And I’m very, very grateful to them for sharing their story. We went to Chicago, spent a lot of time with them in their home, and I think and I hope what they gleaned from us was that we wanted to include John’s story as a way to illustrate the bigger picture that could potentially save more lives down the line. I believe that message comes through in the film, I think they trusted us as messengers of that message. And I really hope when they see the film that they will feel we did right by them.

The challenges though in dealing with suicide — so honestly, they’re huge. I mean, it’s thorny, it’s scary, you have to be again mostly a listener in that regard. And in terms of the letter itself, that was something we didn’t expect to show. We didn’t even broach [that] until we were at their home in Chicago spending quite a few meaningful hours just talking through the story. And they had it in their possession, and . . . that was an inclusion we weren’t counting on. It was only because the moment felt correct to ask for it and I’m very glad we did because I do feel like it’s a very stark reminder of the real stakes with regard to human life that there are questions about that in film.

Why do you think that it takes tragedies like John’s death or extreme situations like Joe’s to bring awareness to a topic like pilot mental health, both by the FAA and the greater public?

I think because — and this is through no fault of anyone’s own, whether that’s like journalists covering aviation or the FAA itself — change, especially big systemic change that has been in place for decades, it’s just hard to enact. It’s expensive, it’s unruly, it’s difficult. So I don’t think it’s a sinister reason people avoid talking about these things and that there’s usually some sort of incident that has to happen to create change. I think it’s unfortunately part of the human and bureaucratic reality that we’re in. But again, what we’re uncovering in the more people we speak to is that it’s almost like, “No news is good news” in terms of aviation incidents. And we’re just trying to say — potentially with some changes in the policy that would allow for a bit more leeway with regards to mental health treatment and physical health treatment as well, we can just avoid more of these down the line. 

Toward the end of “Lie to Fly,” FAA senior AME Dr. Brent Blue acknowledges that while the agency’s updated guidelines are a great “baby step,” it could and should make changes without congressional involvement. What do you see as the biggest hurdle to implementing new measures at the legislative level?

I personally don’t see any. I mean, there are a lot of people — Rep. Sean Casten, D-Ill., is doing a lot of great work on this stuff. If I’m giving everyone the benefit of the doubt, it could be a bandwidth or budget thing. But I don’t see]  any — I think it could be implemented tomorrow. Eight days after our interview [with the FAA] they did implement some change, and I think we were grateful to see that. But it proves that there can be change implemented without a huge congressional bill being passed or anything like that. Dr. Susan Northrup is in a very powerful position as the federal air surgeon, so I was happy to see those changes made. I think it just shows that change is a little bit easier perhaps than we thought. 

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If there’s one thing you hope viewers take away from “Lie to Fly,” what would it be?

I think the important thing is that there’s a larger system at play here. We’re so incredibly respectful and grateful for [Joe’s] full-throated trust in our project, in our process. That’s very rare to find, so first of all thanks to him and his family. But I think the biggest takeaway that I want people to have is that Joe’s story is a microcosm. It’s a way of telling a bigger story and it’s a way of interrogating a system. And I think part of what we wanted to convey is exactly that there’s a larger system here we want to interrogate. It affects all of us, so mostly that. And I think again, the biggest question is, “Is the status quo making the flying public less safe or more safe?” And that’s up to viewers. I can’t answer that question. I have my own thoughts on it, but I’d be curious what people think about that.

“Lie to Fly” is streaming on Hulu.

If you are in crisis, please call the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.