Originally Posted by
CGLimits
Except, according to this article, there may be evidence suggesting the investigators concluded the wrong pilot stepped out of the flight deck. So if indeed the captain was the one at the controls, and the first officer stuck outside, then all his mental health issues are completely irrelevant to the crash.
Regardless, did the ALT knob also pull itself, immediately after the ALT window dialed itself to zero? That's getting to be even more astronomically unlikely odds.
Only way that scenario gets out of the realm of extreme exponential statistics is if the airplane is already in an assigned descent, and the window malfunctioned to an altitude lower than the terrain ahead. Right after one pilot left and the other became incap.
Doesn't even matter which pilot left, still astronomically unlikely. You can do the rough math, but the starting point is annual global sudden incap in airline ops which is single digits. You can google the number of global airline hours flown annually and derive the odds of that happening in any ten minute period. That's an infinitesmally small number, that only gets smaller after you account for the multiple malfunctions also required (ALT window, ALT knob, keypad).