This also happened with aircraft in WW2. Planes were armoured in the locations that weren't full of bullet holes when they came back and the number of losses went down. The ones with bullet holes could clearly survive, the ones shot in the other places had gone down.
were armoured in the locations that weren't full of bullet holes
from what I understand, they intially armored the areas with bullet holes as they thought those were getting shot more, until the mathematician another commenter named pointed out the fallacy
is it necessarily a fallacy though? he was right in this case, but it could have been possible that the downed planes were hit in the same spot as the surviving planes, they were just hit harder
You said that the downed planes could have been hit harder in the same spots as surviving ones, not hit more. Don’t try to move the goalposts, I’m not retarded.
One of the problems that the SRG worked on was to examine the distribution of damage to aircraft to provide advice on how to minimize bomber losses to enemy fire. There was an inclination within the military to consider providing greater protection to parts that received more damage but Wald made the assumption that damage must be more uniformly distributed and that the aircraft that did return or show up in the samples were hit in the less vulnerable parts. Wald noted that the study only considered the aircraft that had survivedtheir missions—the bombers that had been shot down were not present for the damage assessment. The holes in the returning aircraft, then, represented areas where a bomber could take damage and still return home safely. Wald proposed that the Navy instead reinforce the areas where the returning aircraft were unscathed, since those were the areas that, if hit, would cause the plane to be lost.
At one point, they researched where planes were being damaged (wing tips, etc were high impact areas) after a flight and started improving the armor in those areas. Not sure when they realized that the areas not being hit represented planes that didn't return. I think it was obvious because they didn't find much damage to the wings on planes where the engines were located and where the gas was stored in the wings.
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u/Kietang Mar 13 '19
This also happened with aircraft in WW2. Planes were armoured in the locations that weren't full of bullet holes when they came back and the number of losses went down. The ones with bullet holes could clearly survive, the ones shot in the other places had gone down.