Lockheed Martin officials maintain that a problem with the F-22A airframe revealed last December bears no “safety of flight risk” or reduction in the aircraft’s service life, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Company officials also said that the Air Force is well within its contractual rights to withhold nearly $60 million to inspect the 48 fighters affected by a flaw that could lead to cracking. Air Force officials earlier this year told lawmakers that they had not restricted flight for any F-22s because of a “misapplied” standard in heat-treating the titanium in the forward section of the airframe.
Special-ops aviators, a physicist from the intelligence community, and an enlisted Marine with decades of deployments: U.S. Space Command’s military and civilian leaders who spoke May 7 were as likely to come from strictly space backgrounds as not. These are some of the day’s insights from inside the command, which…