I don't know about Her Majesty's Magnificent Flying Organisation using new 'cats eyes', but there has been a lot of publicity about the use of new 'active cats eyes' on roads in the foreseeable future.
Are you permitted to indicate which of the bases are involved, as I think they'd be of most use to the fast jet type stations where forward illumination is probably limited compared to the truckies. I'd therefore tend to think in terms of Marham, Honington, Brawdy, Lossiemouth, Leuchars, etc (rather than Brize Norton / Northolt / Lyneham). I could envisage that the beams of landing lights for fast jets would tend to be narrower than those of truckies (for tactical reasons) and that they'd therefore not have enough scatter to adequately illuminate ground-based reflective cats eyes during the early stages of the approach.
Slight techie question - I'm not sure that you'd detect a pulsed rate of 50Hz too well - maybe they're multiplexing the LEDs to cut down on power consumption / control circuitry, etc, but that's just me guessing!