title_body: How do DJI drones achieve such long flight times compared to traditional FPV drones? DJI is able to achieve ~30 minute flight times with their dones. Whereas, a typical FPV drone is only ~7 minutes
  I see this as a huge achievement by DJI, I am interested to understand how they were able to achieve this advancement
  
  The flight characteristics of these two crafts are quite different. A DJI drone is flown at much slower speeds than FPV drones So, if a FPV drone was flown slowly and cautiously, would the battery extend to be comparable with DJI's?
  
  I have read elsewhere that the energy cost of FPV drones is due to the small blades, the motor needs to spin faster to compensate. This would imply that if you increased the blades (and the arm length) you would get longer flight times...?
  
  Or has DJI really advanced that much in ESC performance, motor performance, battery chemistry to reduce energy losses?
upvoted_answer: There's no magic technology, it's just a difference in design goals. FPV drones are designed for speed, performance and robustness, DJI drones are designed for duration and carrying a gimbled camera.
  Larger, slower turning rotors are more efficient at producing lift but have a lower top speed. That's why helicopters can hover and propeller planes with the same size engine can't - but the plane is faster. Photography drones (such as DJI) use large rotors and exploit that efficiency for duration. Race drones use smaller rotors because they want to go as fast as possible.
  The other factor is that photography drones typically carry larger batteries for longer duration, while race drones want to keep their weight down for maximum agility and acceleration. A photography drone will fly so long as it can produce more thrust than its weight, typically they have less than a 2:1 thrust-to-weight ratio and can't maintain altitude when angled more than 45 degrees from horizontal. Race drones can have a 10:1 thrust to weight ratio, and commonly fly at pretty extreme angles.
  So long as a race drone has enough duration to complete the race, any extra battery capacity is just dead weight, slowing it down. For their pilots, changing the battery every few minutes is a small price to pay for the performance.