[dmix]

I’m curious if there is some monetary trade off for the sound level:

>> the plane’s four-bladed Hartzell composite propeller generated all of the remarkably quiet takeoff sound — a fraction of the thunder from the legacy Beaver’s radial piston

Maybe they’ll get a special class to be able to launch closer to cities without the noise complaints. Although I’d imagine it’s still pretty loud.

Also the bit after the paragraph about the batteries filling up the back mentions they didn’t use fully efficient batteries... they purposefully chose very safe but underpowered batteries previously used and flight tested by NASA for their own testing purposes instead of the higher end batteries used today in EV cars.