> What certainly hasn’t been done before is to fill a Beaver’s cabin with lithium-ion batteries, taking the plane to its gross weight. As a technology demonstrator, this eBeaver isn’t carrying passengers — there isn’t room — and will only have a 15-minute endurance with a 25-minute reserve.
Sorry, you seem to be quoting a bit selectively. From the same article:
> These are batteries that NASA is using, but they’re not batteries that we’d use if we were going to try and make it economical to fly today, because they’re very low in watt-hours per kilogram
On the other hand, it's not like NASA was trying to get the lowest energy density possible. They were trying to get a li-ion battery pack with acceptable safety margin. And for this I understand one of the biggest factors is to have sufficient space between cells that a thermal runaway in one cell cannot spread.
It's a seaplane, it lands on the water, not an airport. Additionally, the total flight time including reserve is 40 minutes in this prototype and will be at least 60 minutes on the operational one (with Tesla-like-energy-density batteries).
From the article:
> What certainly hasn’t been done before is to fill a Beaver’s cabin with lithium-ion batteries, taking the plane to its gross weight. As a technology demonstrator, this eBeaver isn’t carrying passengers — there isn’t room — and will only have a 15-minute endurance with a 25-minute reserve.