10/13/2021
I'm sharing this for colleagues who are planning to fly commercially with Lipo batteries for their drones.
On a flight from Johannesburg to Accra I recently had to overnight in Addis Ababa.
On arrival from the hotel early in the morning at the airport I had to pass through two full security sceenings. I had two 6 cell 7000mAh Lipobatteries (yes, for drones) in my backpack. I took them out of the backpack and put them in a tray next to my laptop for scanning. At the first screening there was no issue - I went through without any questions. At the second screening I was allowed to proceed after I had explained that the items next to my laptop were lipo batteries used in drones. As I was leaving the second screening I was called over for a secondary, manual search.
Again I was asked to explain but this time they told me that I was not allowed to take the batteries with me on board. An hour or so later I was ordered to hand over the batteries to a supervisor so that he could arrange for them to be loaded in the cargo bay! It took me a long time to explain to him that that was very dangerous and highly illegal thing to do in terms of IATArules. Unfortunately I did not have internet connection and so was not able to show him the relevant rule. By this time I was getting concerned about making my flight so I did not escalate the issue any further but did suggest that the pilot of my flight be consulted.
The end of the story was that I was the first passenger to be welcomed on board with a big smile by a flight attendant who took custody of my bag and delivered it to the cockpit. Upon disembarcation in Accra the bag was handed back to me again with a big smile. All is well that ends well. In hindsight I should have carried hard copies of the rules with me. That way I would have had an easier time convincing the officials.
By the way, we specifically design our drones to fly with two 6s 7000mAh batteries so that we can carry two of them with us on our international missions. As per IATA rules you are allowed to carry on board two batteries with a maximum energy of 160Wh each. The Watt hours are computed by multiplying the Voltage (V) with the capacity (Ah). A Lipo cell has a nominal volatage of 3.7V. (6cellsx3.7V) x 7A = 22.2V x 7A = 155.4Wh which is just slightly less than the maximum allowable limit of 160Wh.So while we would have loved to take off with more battery power for longer endurance we stick to a pair of 6s 7000mAh packs to get some 100km of flight line out of a flight.
https://www.iata.org/contentassets/6fea26dd84d24b26a7a1fd5788561d6e/passenger-lithium-battery.pdf
