Originally Posted by
Less Hair
The main problem for battery powered aircraft I see is their weight. Especially on landing. An empty battery is as heavy as a fully loaded one. That's like every landing will be a heavy landing. Combine that with short endurance and many short flights and you have a high structural fatigue and you will need more robust structure.
It might be a challenge for the electrification of an existing design but not such a big deal if you give up some payload as pattern_is_full pointed out.
For a clean sheet design, the empty weight penalty of bringing structural weight from MLW to MTOW is about 0.7% (actual number of one hybrid design I am working on). In the list of main problems for battery powered aircraft, that landing weight issue ranks below the top 100.