By Thomas P. Turner

Who hasn’t been tempted to load “just a bit more” into an airplane? Early on, we all learned to keep the airplane loaded within its center-of-gravity limits and the weight below the maximum certified gross...yet we hear stories of airplanes being flown well above their maximum certificated weight, and numerous legal gross weight increases are commercially available. Over-gross operations are routinely approved under certain circumstances in Alaska and for airplanes being ferried overseas. So, how serious are an airplane’s weight limitations and what happens when we exceed them? One word: performance. …