A friend who's converting on to the B767 at the moment is having trouble understanding the flying control breakout mechanism.
I tried to explain it to him (I have 4000 hours on type) and couldn't. After much searching, I found a Jan 2004 thread on the Egyptair 990 crash which contained the following input:
"...I remember the Airtours 767 departing from the Canaries which (after a Monarch mechanic had left a very large torch in a wing inspection compartment) found itself unable to turn left. After a wings vertical moment or two when both pilots tried the breakout procedure (didn't work. no-one explained why), they continued back to Manchester (no left turns on the way).
Airtours sat heavily on the incident, which they (after the press got wind of it) described as a minor malfunction ably handled by the crew.
I could never find any signs of an investigation, or an incident report, or any attempts by a seemingly inert CAA to pass on useful information to other users.
In the end the captain went to a national broadsheet and it was given half a page of shock/horror..and then....nothing happened as far as I know.
In a responsible airline everyone would have learned a lot from the whole thing. In the air force, the incident report would have been an inch thick and still be being read in crewrooms."
Did anyone ever investigate the incident?
Why didn't breakout work?
Why was a UK airline allowed to cover up a major occurrence?
Can anyone who was in Airtours at the time, or in a responsible part of the CAA, throw any light on how it could be hushed up?
And the original query: how should breakout work???