Folks, when doing these tests, it's usually a lot easier to upload the log to AirData and then see the battery drain chart, and the battery flight time estimates (which extrapolates down to zero mAh, but you can shave 20% off that to know what a 'safe' max flight time would be). Just hovering in place, with a stock
Air3, I get 30 mins (+/- 1 minute) of hover time - and even if I switch all sensors and AirSense off, that only increases by around 40 seconds. Conversely, going around and around in a 50m wide circle (spotlight'd), max flight time drops to 22 minutes - but the CPU is probably working a little bit harder too thinking about how to keep the object in the centre of frame.
The extra capacity of the
A3 battery should give an extra 20 seconds in flight time, is less important than the reduced weight - 20g - which should increase flight time by an additional 40 seconds. So, calculations-wise, a total of an extra minute.
But - and a big but - the type of the battery technology is different - li-ion (
A3) vs li-po (A3s), and li-ion batterys have a much flatter voltage drop curve (airdata can show you the chart, which a big-fat flat voltage output between 10-25 mins). li-po batteries usually have a MUCH longer slope, which voltage dropping nearly proportional to remaining capacity. Obviously, DJI add voltage regulation to keep things equal, but how efficient the regulation is, probably makes a big difference, if it's 60% efficient, that's 40% of the power waisted when the battery isn't delivering the full voltage. As batteries are empty at 15% below 4v, you can assume (ahem...) that 7.5% of the total power is regulated, 40% of the that is lost, and therefore 1.5% waisted - about 30 seconds lost. This probably explains why the A3s, despite being roughly the same weight, and having a lighter, more powerful battery, with it's additional sensors - which are all turned off during DJI's flight-time testing - gives the same flight time (give/take 1 minute) as the
Air3 under the same conditions.
I actually think, from all of this, the biggest factor is how the batteries loose capacity over time, if one battery technology loses 30% capacity over it's lifetime 200 flights (9 minutes lost), but the other looses 20% (6 minutes), after 100 flights, the difference is 1.5 minutes....
So, to summarize:
Until some posts test data: the new A3s batteries don't look like they should bring any more than 1 minute of extra flight time to an Air 3. However, *any* new battery (Air 3 or Air 3S) could add up to 9 minutes (!!!) if your old battery was truly at the brink of death at nearly 200 recharge cycles.....
In fact at least 1 person has found a new A3s battery gave them 5 minutes of extra flight time...but admitted their old battery was only giving them 20 minute flights.....so may have been near end of it's life.
