Quoting Ian W:-
"The incident where an A340 climbed past an A330 in a zoom climb during the day VMC and recovered."
I think you've 'found the smoking gun,' Ian W, congratulations.
For 18 seconds after the autopilot disengaged the aircraft remained within 200 feet altitude of FL 360 but once AoA law was invoked at 14:21:50 hrs, the aircraft's attitude began to pitch nose-up. The pitch-up trend continued for 17 seconds reaching a peak of 15° nose-up shortly before the first nose-down sidestick command was applied. Throughout this phase the aircraft climbed rapidly (reaching a peak rate of about 6,000 ft/min) due to the increase in lift created by the flight control system's capture of alpha prot. The aircraft reached its apogee at FL 384 at 14:22:28 hrs where the airspeed had decayed to 205 KIAS and 0.67 Mach even though full thrust had been applied.
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The crew subsequently descended back to FL 360 and successfully re-engaged the autopilot and autothrust systems.
That isn't referring to the AF 447 accident. It's from the British Air Accident Investigation Board's report on the 2000 A340 Atlantic 'zoom climb' incident you mention.
Apparently the autopilot and autothrust disengaged on that occasion too. The 'zoom climb' was triggered by the aircraft going into 'Angle of Attack' Law (yet another law for us to half-understand
).
http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de/publ...pdf_501275.pdf
I find it very interesting that the 'protections' began to zoom-climb the A340 18 seconds after the autopilot and autothrust disengaged. That's just about exactly the same time that the AF 447 zoom climb commenced, as shown by the excerpts from the BEA Note that I quoted above.