Last week, we heard about after the pilot became incapacitated due to a medical emergency. That passenger, Darren Harrison, , and one thing comes through loud and clear: This guy is an absolute badass.

Harrison, 39, was flying home from a fishing trip in the Bahamas on the Cessna 208 Caravan. There were three people in total on the small, single-engine plane: Harrison, the pilot, and the pilot’s friend. As the plane drew close to Florida, the pilot suffered a medical emergency and became unresponsive.

“I knew it was a life-or-death situation,” in the interview, published to YouTube this morning. “You do what you have to do to control the situation, or you’re gonna die. And that’s what I did.”

The flight started off normal. Harrison even took a cheeky photo not long after takeoff, his bare feet resting on the seat in front of him, the pilot and the other passenger in the front seats, a beautiful cloud-dappled blue sky through the windows.

Then it all unraveled. The pilot started showing signs of severe discomfort. “He said, I’ve got a headache, and I’m fuzzy, and I just don’t feel right,” Harrison told Guthrie. After that, the pilot was completely unresponsive.

The plane was already starting to lose altitude. Harrison reached around the pilot’s shoulders, pulled back — gently — on the stick, and leveled the plane.

“How did you know how to do that,” Guthrie asks.

“Just common sense, I guess,” Harrison says. “I knew if I went up and yanked, the airplane would stall.”

Badass.

Harrison managed to get the pilot out of his seat, but the pilot’s headset wires frayed and broke. Thankfully, the front-seat passenger’s headset was still working.

The rest of the story is an edge-of-your-seat adventure. The Today interview is 10 minutes long, and you’re gonna want to watch the whole thing (below). As you now know, Harrison . The pilot went to the hospital, and is expected to make a full recovery.

One line from Harrison’s interview stuck out with me. He tells Guthrie, “I slowly feathered the brakes as I’m going down the runway, and surprisingly I felt so comfortable with it, I radioed [...] ‘do you guys want me to turn off the runway to clear it out?’”

Darren Harrison sounds like a car guy. One with ice-water in his veins, and a level head when the situation goes terrifying. We salute him.