One_of_the_Strange over on ARRSE brought up a good point regarding the 'illogical' faliure to inform MoD:
Well, I worked for them in the 90's and based on that I wonder whether or not the coroner was aware of the seismic changes that occurred around then in the way the UK handled such things. Back in the day (pre Eurofighter) qualification and acceptance of seats for the UK forces was done by Bedford and Boscombe Down using their aircraft, facilities and staff. That would certainly have been the case for the original 10B Hawk seat. There was also a high degree of involvement by the Institute of Aviation Medicine in many of the details. So MBA would never have been involved in signing things off and would have not have dealt directly with the user.
Arrangements differed for export customers, depending on exactly what they wanted to pay MBA for and what they wanted to do themselves. But again in the back of my mind I have the feeling that export users would be far more likely to be sent stuff directly from MBA as they were quite happy to have MBA qual the seat for them and handle all technical issues.
So, all that was fine and dandy as long as it lasted. But then Bedford closed, Boscombe shrank to a shadow of it's former self and (when I dealt with them) their fleet of three test aircraft and tens of staff had shrunk to half a graduate and some filing cabinets. Which I pillaged one day as part of some work we were doing for the MoD to find that only a rather sparse set of documentation remained. I think it was the first time we'd seen any of it, and we were doing the work as the MoD was no longer able to do anything like it any more. Oh, and the Institute of AM had become a School and the decades of experience they used to have had walked.
Then of course we have the slow death of airworthiness in the MoD as detailed in the Haddon-Cave report. Past my time of course, but not an environment conducive to the painstaking attention to detail needed to catch this sort of problem.
Now, MBA certainly had (maybe they still do ?) a reputation in some quarters as a bolshy bunch of bastards to work with but that bolshiness consisted of telling various customers and airframers that they were talking nonsense and would they kindly shut up and listen to someone who understood the problem. They still exist as a company because they get things right, and Air Forces tend to be run by people who look favourably on that attitude towards escape systems.
So I firmly believe that if MBA knew there was a problem in service they'd have made noises, and lots of them. However, if they'd sent the paperwork to an organisation in turmoil and it got binned, fell between the cracks I wouldn't be surprised at all. Maybe they just assumed that the system would work as it always had done without realising that it wasn't any more.