In the late 80's, a US vessel in Middle Eastern waters experienced a Guided Missile Launcher failure.........normally we in OZ would never hear of such things, however the US put out a
DEF Nav Alert, & we had three such Launchers on our RAN Destroyers.....so the bearing that failed was replaced on many 100's of vessels that used that Launcher, worldwide
Upshot of this was the US Technical Enquiry determined the bearing failure was by exceeding it's
End of Use date and a very poorly worded
Alert caused a very expensive confusion by who should have known better
viewed this as every bearing [even in storage] that had exceeded it's End of Use date as to be scrapped Even at GID, many, many trolley loads of new sealed bearings that had an
EOU Date were scrapped
The
Alert should have nominated bearings that had
exceeded their design cycles..
Derek...