They can indeed.You can test this your self simply make a paper airplane and place a paperclip or tape a coin in a funny place it will display very poor flight characteristics.If the paper clip is the correct place it will fly well.The same applies to any aircraft if the load inside is positioned in such a manner that it effects the center of gravity that aircraft will become unstable very quickly even if the load that moved or was placed poorly from the start is well within the weight limits of the design.You can do the same thing with one of those balsa wood gliders just place that nose weight else where.Now Imagine that you changed the nose weight to a completely different position as the glider was flaying essentially that is what happened to that 747-400.At least the entire thing took only a few seconds so they did not have long to realize their fate.
Of course they will have the black boxes and such but just from my relative lay knowledge in aeronautics I know that a massive load shift in flight or a load positioned improperly in the first place is very bad news.We had to follow very strict guidelines when prepping equipment for pallet loading and you have people whose job it is to prep pallets and load them and the load master would be the one that orders where items go they would also make sure that weights where correct and that cargo is secured.Load masters fly with the plane and they will know the design well in the respect of how to maintain the center of gravity.
I am going to guess that a civilian cargo company might over work their load masters it would not surprise me.
A load shift would mean a change from controllable flight to an unrecoverable situation in seconds in any aircraft you will either die or bail out if possible in most civilian aircraft escaping is not an option.Even at 26,000 feet if the center of gravity was drastically changed the plane would still fall from the sky.
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