I have no first-hand knowledge of the course of the coronial proceedings as a result of this tragedy.
However, I’m completely unsurprised that the relatives of the deceased pilot or someone else brought the coroner’s attention to the ATSB report. The average punter would make the reasonable-though-naive assumption that the whole point of the ATSB’s existence is to find out why an accident occurred and that task would involve some deeper analysis beyond pilot error - given what we’ve supposed to have learned about these issues over decades.
But that seems to me to have presented the coroner with a conundrum: What evidential weight should be put on the findings and expressions of opinion contained in the ATSB report? For the reasons explained by the coroner, the answer was: Little-to-none. Absent some statements in the ATSB report as to the qualifications of the author/s and the basis upon which the findings and opinions were based, and absent someone from ATSB giving evidence at the inquest, that answer is pretty unsurprising to me. So the coroner is left with…
The relatives of the pilot who died in this tragedy aren’t the first and won’t be the last to be left bewildered - sometimes worse - at what the ATSB (and CASA) do and how they go about doing it.