When the aircraft has an additional app for adding payloads we might see that the aircraft starts up with no cargo loaded ready for the payload manager to fill the aircraft.
Usually the Ideal Flight setting in Cold & Dark is to load the aircraft before starting the sim. The payloads are pre-entered into the section in the flight file. These might be ignored when we start a flight with a payload managed aircraft.
Instead, we can set Ideal Flight to load the payload programmatically just after the sim is started.
In Cold & Dark, Flight Gen page, choose the setting checkbox "Load Aircraft Payload: After Start".
This way we need not worry about setting up the loads and comparing to the briefing. Works with for example the PMDG DC-6, but may not work with all payload managers.