The forum thread in question touches on a genuinely obscure but well-documented corner of military aviation: the full-scale aerial target (FSAT) program, which converts retired fighter aircraft into remotely piloted drones for live-fire weapons testing and pilot training against realistic, maneuverable targets. The poster's memory of blacked-out A-4 Skyhawks at Eglin AFB is consistent with the QF-4 (converted F-4 Phantoms), QF-16 (converted F-16 Fighting Falcons), and earlier QF-104 (converted F-104 Starfighters) programs run by the Navy and Air Force. These aircraft are stripped of ejection seats and cockpit displays, fitted with remote flight control systems, and flown either autonomously or via ground/airborne control links to simulate enemy aircraft in missile and gun testing. The Navy's NAVAIR Full-Scale Aerial Targets program at Point Mugu and the Air Force's 82nd Aerial Targets Squadron at Tyndall AFB have operated these systems for decades, and Eglin's proximity to the Gulf Test Range makes it a logical location for the sighting described.
For working pilots, particularly those with military backgrounds or who fly adjacent to restricted test airspace, this topic is more than trivia. QF-16 and QF-4 drone operations occur within active, segregated airspace during live-fire exercises, and awareness of these programs matters for anyone operating near military test ranges like Eglin, Tyndall, or Point Mugu, where NOTAMs and TFRs frequently reflect target-drone activity. Civilian and business aviation pilots transiting the Gulf of Mexico test corridors or Florida panhandle airspace have long had to account for unmanned target operations, unmanned research aircraft, and associated chase planes, which increases the complexity of flight planning even for aircraft not directly involved in the exercises. Understanding that these "drones" are sometimes full-size, high-performance jets rather than small UAS also underscores why airspace deconfliction procedures around military ranges are unusually conservative.
More broadly, the QF-4/QF-16 lineage represents an early and instructive chapter in the military's push toward unmanned and optionally piloted aircraft, a trend now accelerating dramatically with programs like the Air Force's Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) initiative, the Navy's MQ-25 Stingray tanker drone, and ongoing loyal-wingman concepts pairing manned fighters with autonomous unmanned platforms. The methodology described in the original post—a two-seat chase aircraft with a safety pilot controlling the drone, ground controllers managing takeoff and landing, and specialized arresting gear—was rudimentary by today's standards but proved the core concept that unmanned platforms could safely operate in shared airspace with crewed aircraft under close supervision. That same conceptual framework, now vastly more automated, underlies current efforts to integrate autonomous fighters into combat formations and to certify unmanned cargo and passenger aircraft for civil airspace. Pilots watching the rapid maturation of remote and autonomous flight in both military and commercial sectors are, in effect, watching the modern descendants of the drone Skyhawks and Phantoms once used almost anonymously as target aircraft on ranges like Eglin's.