As for my reference on heavy equipment, it is much more important than you suggest. Tires are the critical factor. The tires are supposed to be inflated with nitrogen but almost all customers inflate with air. Air contains - oxygen. Now think of the size of a tire filled with compressed air - lots of oxygen. Tires are made with flammable materials that tend to deteriorate inside. So we have oxygen, a highly combustable material, all we need is heat for an explosion. Overload, then transport. It is not as simple as you say - sluggish performance. The minimum safety range we say to stay away from an operating truck is 100 meters, but I've located the pieces a lot further from a tire explosion than that. So aircraft are not the only vehicles for which weight and balance are important. Its must that failure to pay attention make for bigger headlines because of the number of people killed per mistake
Which is entirely irrelevant, as glhcarl noted, because aircraft tires are inflated with nitrogen.
I'm an airline transport pilot and certificated mechanic, with more than a few years of doing both (as well as inspector, instructor, engineer, and a few other hats here and there). We don't inflate aircraft tires with shop air. We inflate them with nitrogen, for numerous reasons. Combustability of the inflation mixture is one of them.
Just to be pedantic you are actually talking about MASS not weight.
Actually, we're not.
While weight varies with height and separation from the gravitational body (earth, hopefully); we don't account for those changes, and we calculate weight and balance forms, not mass and balance forms. We worry about mass when we can't get stopped, but weight when we can't get off the ground.
Given our gravitational constants, weight works just fine. Unless we're planning a voyage into space or to another planet, we largely stick with weight calculations when figuring aircraft performance, as one of our four chief forces in defining flight is, of course, gravity. While gravitational acceleration works upon mass, the definition is weight, and that's what we use.
A sure way to get a black eye would be to tell my wife "
My my, dear, have you lost a little mass lately?"
Pedantics, semantics. I just want to live.