Swarm testing requires airspace reservations that take 6 months to approve for 30-minute flight windows

Testing a 50+ drone swarm in the US requires an FAA Certificate of Authorization covering the test airspace, which takes 3-6 months to process. Each test flight gets a 30-60 minute window in a restricted area. A defense startup developing swarm algorithms needs hundreds of flight tests to iterate, but at 6-month approval cycles and 30-minute windows, a single year of development yields perhaps 20 real-world test flights. Simulation cannot substitute because swarm behavior in wind, RF interference, and GPS multipath diverges significantly from simulated environments. This persists because the FAA treats drone swarms as 50 individual aircraft each requiring separate risk assessment, and has no expedited process for developmental military drone testing.