South Korean naval drone test fails after two loitering munitions crash on launch

An initial investigation by South Korea's Agency for Defense Development has traced the failure of a recent naval drone test to a defect in a shipboard launcher, not the aircraft it fired.

The test took place on August 25, 2026, off Busan. Two loitering munitions were launched from ROKS Marado, a Dokdo-class amphibious assault ship, with the goal of showing the drones could launch from a ship and hit an unmanned target vessel roughly two kilometers away.

Neither drone came close. The first crashed into the sea about two seconds after launch. A second attempt later the same day failed in similar fashion, with the aircraft going down after roughly four seconds.

According to the agency, a door on the lower section of the twin-level launcher was slightly misaligned. When a drone launched from an upper tube, the forces generated briefly pushed that door inward. That created an imbalance that shoved the departing aircraft off course almost immediately.

The agency said the deformation was brief and the door returned to its normal position afterward, which made the defect hard to spot during post-crash inspection.

Officials said the drones and the broader system performed normally, and pointed instead to the launcher hardware as the cause. Investigators are now looking into whether the misalignment occurred during assembly, transport, or loading.

The same launch tube had reportedly been used successfully before, and the fault had not appeared in earlier testing, including about 30 land-based trials conducted previously without issue.