By the time this, the strange case of the Alaska Airlines jumpseating pilot who attempted to shut down the engines of a Horizon Air Embraer 175 midflight may have faded from the headlines, but I suspect the impact will last much longer.
Most certainly you still remember it—particularly for the salacious detail that said pilot had partaken in psychedelic mushrooms 40-some hours before his ill-timed psychotic episode. Already, “Had any ’shrooms lately, cap’n?” has supplanted the long-standing “Been drinking lately, cap’n?” as a moronic joke of choice among our more comedically impaired passengers. For much of our empathy-deficient, terminally online general public, a sad case of crumbling mental health that destroyed a family man’s life is little more than darkly humorous grist for the dank meme mills.
