I've noticed that new souped up Mooney has almost no useful load with
full fuel. (Less than 1 big pilot)

It strikes me that there are two limits to gross weight in a single.
The structural and climb performnace limits and the statutory limit that a single engine
stall speed must be less than 61K( I think this number is right)

So this makes me think that the new souped up mooney is probably flown over gross
on the asumption that the only real limit here is the artifical statutory limit.
This would make me feel very uncomfortable. If you routinely fly at over gross weight
you never know close you are to the real structural limits.


I grew up in Alaska and a lot of the bush planes are routinely flown
well over gross.... both knowingly by the pilots and via fudged paperwork.
I've was personally involved with reweighing a Beaver DHC-2 where the official
paperwork had the empty weight suspiciously low. The last weighting paperwork accounted for
Full Fuel, and when we weighed it it was heaver than it should be by this amount.
I suspect that the previouse weighing had the tanks empty and accounted for full.
A lot of the forrest service contracts in South East Alaska had contact limits that said
the aircraft provided must have XX useful low. These numbers were unreasonably low for
most of the specified aircraft models, encopuraging the operators to cheat or go out of business.