A man has admitted to trying to open the emergency exit for an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 while the plane was mid-flight after reaching a plea agreement with prosecutors in which he has pleaded guilty to interference with the flight crew.
Kassian William Fredericks is yet to be sentenced after the plea agreement was filed in court on Thursday, but he faces a maximum sentence of 20 years imprisonment, as well as a fine of up to $250,000.
The terrifying incident occurred on December 10, 2025, as Alaska Airlines flight AS-87 was flying from the small Alaskan community of Deadhorse to the state’s largest city, Anchorage.
During the flight, passengers noticed that Fredericks was talking to himself and was fidgeting a lot, but his seatmates initially thought he suffered from a medical condition like Tourette’s.
As the flight attendants began the in-flight beverage service, however, their attention was drawn to Fredericks when he demanded two vodka shots before yelling out: “The wings have disappeared… We’re all going to die!”
According to an arrest affidavit filed in district court, one of the flight attendants went to check on Fredericks, and he told the crew member, “Meth is coming out of the air vents. Everybody is freaking out.”
The flight attendant asked the passengers sitting around Fredericks to keep an eye on him so that the beverage service could be completed, but at some point, he got up from his seat and slipped away to the back of the plane.
The plea agreement then states that Fredericks was “observed aggressively trying to open the rear cabin door.”
It continues: “A passenger ran over to Defendant [Fredericks], who had the arm of the cabin door moved upward and grabbed him, trying to stop him. The passenger turned around and yelled to some other male passengers at the back of the plane to come and help him.”
After being pulled away from the door and moved to a seat, Fredericks said that he thought he was overdosing.
On arrival in Anchorage, Fredericks was taken to the hospital for medical evaluation, where he was overheard telling a doctor that he had been drinking for the past 10 days, was seeing and hearing things, and was currently taking antidepressants.
While the Captain told investigators that Fredericks would not have been able to physically open the emergency exit due to the pressurization in the cabin, the flight attendants feared that his actions could have caused the emergency slide to inflate inside the plane.
A date is yet to be set by the court for Fredericks to be sentenced.
Tragically, mental health and drug abuse issues have become a prominent cause of mid-flight unruly passenger incidents, which aren’t as easily fixed by ‘zero tolerance’ campaigns or Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s calls to bring “civility back to air travel.”
In the last few years, U.S. airlines have become so worried about the prospect of passengers overdosing on powerful opioids like fentanyl that they now routinely stock life-saving drugs like Narcan that can reverse the effects of an opioid overdose in seconds.
Back in 2019, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) recommended airlines start stocking Narcan, which is also sometimes known as Naloxone. The recommendation came just months after a young man died of a drug overdose aboard a cross-country Delta Air Lines flight from Boston to Los Angeles.
It wasn’t until 2024, however, that Southwest said it would start equipping its medical kits with Naloxone. Alaska Airlines also stocks Naloxone on its flights.
Deadhorse is not so much a small Alaskan community, it is the primary airport for Prudhoe Bay and associated oil fields.
There might not be a worse flight to FAFO. The passengers flying south from Deadhorse are oil field workers coming off of weeks of shift work and are highly motivated to make sure their flight gets to Anchorage with zero disruption.