I'm no expert on the airworthiness saga, but I think I've picked up enough from tuc and Chug over the years to understand that the problems date from the late 80s / early 90s - correct? Therefore, since the Hawk entered service in the 1970s, I presume that a fully-functioning airworthiness organisation scrutinised the design of the ejection seat and found no problems with either the firing handle safety pin or the scissor shackle.
If MB's information regarding overtightening of the scissor shackle bolt was released in the 1990s then it conceivably might have got lost in the by-now-dysfunctional airworthiness organisation, in which case the MoD could rightly be blamed. However MB have not challenged the accusation that they failed to inform the MoD about the issue. To me it seems a bit churlish, in the absence of any evidence whatsoever, to assume that the MoD must have received and failed to act upon the information.
As for the seat handle and safety pin, if its design was approved by the fully-functioning airworthiness organisation of the 1970s, and there were no instances of handles being pulled to a hair trigger position until Sean's accident, then how exactly was anyone supposed to recognise and mitigate the risk? I think we know that a few pilots have inadvertantly pulled the handle a little way and then pushed it back in on various marks of seat; if these instances were never formally reported or acted upon then the failure was not so much in airworthiness funding as it was in aircrew reporting culture. And I think we all know how poor that was in the 1970s / 1980s!How, exactly, would airworthiness process have identified the hazard without an incident report?
It seems to me that the best opportunities to stop the accident were the visual checks of the seat safety pin. As I said in an earlier post, having seen mock-up photos, the clues were subtle but they were definitely there. Of the 19 opportunities to spot the condition, at least 4 would have belonged to Sean as he pinned the seat, got out, got back in, and unpinned the seat. Knowing a little of the Reds' way of doing business, the fact that the SI president testified about their unit culture at the inquest suggests to me that the report (which I have yet to see) will touch on self-imposed time pressures, which (if true) would further reduce the likelihood of spotting the condition of the seat handle.
This is not Nimrod or Patriot; there were opportunities for the Reds' management, the lineys and the pilot to identify weaknesses or faults and break the accident chain. There may well have been design and communication failings elsewhere but I do not believe that this accident was fundamentally the making of a dysfunctional or negligent airworthiness organisation. The payout is at least as likely to result from acknowledged failings within Air Command as it is within DE&S, in my view...