Last week, A guy pulled up beside me at a light to tell me that I only had the third stop light, and no taillight stop lights. When I got to work, I looked around a little, and noticed when I put the tilt wheel up all the way, the tail/stop lights came on. That night, I pulled the shroud from the steering column. The signal and emergency flasher switches are integrated into one switch. The connector right on top of the flasher switch (4 or 5 wires) had two wires backing out of the plastic plug. One of these was the tailight /stoplight connection to the flashers. There should be tabs which click into the plastic, but these were not funtional. I wound up super glueing the wires into the plastic.
Now , this truck has never been apart, leading me to believe that this is a quality issue. My truck is a 99 F150 4x4 w/ 75k miles. If anyone has a similar problem, use this as a possible remedy. Keep in mind that the tilt wheel may not play into your problem. Just so happens that my wire was backed out just enough that when I tilted ther wheel all the way up, the wire contacted the switch, giving me lights. One more thing.....the wiring harness is made in Mexico!

 

There was one other guy on here with the same problem, but I believe his plugs had almost come apart, instead of the contact coming out of the plug like yours did. He had the same "tilt all the way and it would work" symptom. He ended up gluing his plugs together because the latches on the plugs had broken.

It seems in both cases, there too much strain on the wiring in that location.