is the default weight "insanely overloaded"?

[ATOP]

not a complaint, just a comment...when I first started using FSX, I had all kinds of trouble landing the bigger aircraft, until I realized that the reason planes were stalling at what I thought was an absurd speed was because I hadn't bothered to lighten the load and/or the fuel.  

but as far as my question, does anybody know how the default payload weights measure up to reality?  Am I carrying a load of sumo wrestlers on every flight, or what?

I noticed this in particular on a couple of add-on prop-driven airliners, btw...so maybe it's not FSX itself, so much...certainly the weight in the smaller planes seems perfectly reasonable.

[Brett Hill 2]

[quote]not a complaint, just a comment...when I first started using FSX, I had all kinds of trouble landing the bigger aircraft, until I realized that the reason planes were stalling at what I thought was an absurd speed was because I hadn't bothered to lighten the load and/or the fuel.

[EJW]

Jens Christiansens DC-4 is particularly bad at this. It's a well made model, but it would take miles to successfully take off (it had a longer t/o distance than a fully loaded 747 and it was impossible to reach 3,500ft. Even when empty it feels a little too heavy than it should.
The opposite is true to a B-52 I downloaded. It only needed 1/4 mile of runway and would keep on going upto 75,000ft +.
Good point!