@Prober,
IF the claim has any relation to the truth, one would presume that the LS prepared & presented to the crew did not reflect the correct payload.
While the TU5 is a forgiving bird with a lot of overengineering and probably you could achieve a successful planned takeoff at 10 tons over MTOW, same cannot be said if speeds and flaps settings are based on a lower weight. The table presented by Kulverstukas (
http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/5...ml#post9626860) shows a 15-20 Kph difference in reference speeds for every 10 tons of weight increase.