John Farley,
It is not a silly question but it is not easy to answer your post in a meaningful way without asking you for some clarification:
What is your aviation background?
Aviation buff. I'm not a pilot or an aerospace engineer
What do you mean by 'fly reasonably well' (for example do you mean they have high top speeds,are controllable in turbulence, have good takeoff and landing handling characteristics etc etc)
Mostly good takeoff performance, but not just that. The other issue has to do with turning performance and such, you'd expect a plane with the wing-loading figures typically seen on a commercial-airliner (727, DC-10, etc) to lose speed much quicker than it does for it's wing-loading in turns.
I have heard about numerous cases in which relatively high g-loads were pulled (not intentionally, by accident) and while the plane lost speed in the turns, you would think that for the thrust to weight ratios an airliner has, and the heavy wing loadings, the plane would have quickly lost all it's speed and just dropped out of the sky like a brick.
What do you mean by 'horrendously high' (do you just mean many times that of a GA light aircraft? or something else?)
Well, as I understand it wing-loadings over 85 lbs/ft[sup]2[/sup].
The original 727-100 had a MTOW around 160,000 pounds and a wing-area of 1,650 square-feet, yielding a wing-loading of 96.97 lbs/ft[sup]2[/sup].
The DC-10-10 had a MTOW of 430,000 pounds and a wing-area of 3,550 square-feet, yielding a wing-loading of 121.13 lbs/ft[sup]2[/sup].