A Pensacola fishing charter hauled a US Air Force drone out of the Gulf of Mexico on Saturday, and the drone is a copy of Iran’s Shahed-136. Hot Spots Charters captain Daniel Arsenault spotted the gray delta-wing airframe floating offshore near Eglin Air Force Base, pulled a mahi-mahi out from under it, and had his passengers help drag it onto the bow.
The airframe matches the FLM-136, the SpektreWorks target drone the Pentagon turned into the LUCAS attack drone that has been flying combat missions against Iran since February. Eglin says a test article went down. It won’t say which one.
Eglin Confirms a Lost Test Article but Won’t Name the Drone
An Eglin Air Force Base spokesperson told The War Zone the base recently lost a drone during a test. The spokesperson would not confirm it was the one Hot Spots Charters recovered, name the type, or say when or where it went down, and referred further questions to the Pentagon.
“I can confirm that we were doing a test and the test article went down,” the spokesperson told The War Zone, which broke the story Sunday. CNN has asked Eglin for comment.
The type is not much of a secret. Photos Hot Spots posted to Facebook show the drone missing its nose cone and rear propeller, both common losses in a water impact, but the delta wing and fuselage match the FLM-136 that Arizona-based SpektreWorks built as a Shahed stand-in for counter-drone training. Local charter captain and aviation photographer Charlie Green told The War Zone that Arsenault notified local agencies and one of them collected the drone. Hot Spots put it more plainly on Facebook: “The black suvs came and got their drone, all is good!”
Eglin’s 96th Test Wing runs the Eglin Gulf Test Range, about 120,000 square miles of overwater airspace covering the eastern third of the Gulf. The Air Force keeps a handful of 120-foot boats there, crewed by contractor Florida Offshore, to retrieve roughly 100 downed target drones a year. This one got past them and ended up on a dock in Pensacola with a boat-rental phone number on the sign behind it. One commenter on the Hot Spots page had the verdict: “Fun fight but they’re super bony and taste like avgas.”
LUCAS Losses Are Priced In at $35,000 an Airframe
A LUCAS attack drone costs about $35,000, the figure CENTCOM gave when it stood up Task Force Scorpion Strike in December 2025. The drone first flew in combat on February 28, opening day of Operation Epic Fury. Within days, one came down almost intact in Iraq.
The Pentagon unveiled the design in July 2025 as an American answer to the Shahed, and CENTCOM announced the first combat use the same day the strikes on Iran began. The drone is 9.8 feet (2.9 meters) long with an 8.2-foot (2.5-meter) wingspan and weighs about 70 pounds (32 kilograms), light enough for a charter crew to lift aboard. DroneXL’s comparison of the two airframes in March covered how SpektreWorks reverse-engineered the Shahed and what $35,000 buys against the Iranian original.
Losing airframes is part of the design. Open-source accounts photographed a nearly complete LUCAS on the ground in Iraq on March 2, and The War Zone reported multiple intact losses during the Iran campaign. Florida has seen this before too: in March 2021, beachcombers in Palm Beach County found a BQM-167A target drone washed ashore, another Air Force target drone flown from the Florida ranges.
DroneXL’s Take
The fishing story is the fun part. The useful part is that this weapon works because losing one doesn’t matter. A $35,000 airframe on a fishing boat, or in an Iraqi field, is an accounting line. The target version carries no warhead and the design is Iran’s to begin with. This one did not even keep its nose section. There is nothing on that dock Tehran hasn’t already seen.
Which makes Eglin’s refusal to name the type, after CNN identified it from a photo taken on a public dock, habit rather than security. My read is this won’t be the last one anglers find. The Air Force already fishes about 100 targets a year out of those waters, a BQM-167A washed up in 2021, and LUCAS development has moved on to swarming work that needs ranges like Eglin’s. Some of it is going to float.
Sources: The War Zone, CNN
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.
