Survivorship Bias Plane

About

Survivorship Bias Plane also known as Plane With Red Dots refers to a reaction image meme showing a diagram of a plane with red dots collected on its wings. The image is sourced from a Wikipedia page about survivorship bias, with World War II planes being used as an example of the concept. Many WW2 planes returned from their missions with damage on their wings, and undertaking bullet reinforcement in the hit wing areas would be an example of survivorship bias, considering that planes damaged in other areas did not survive and were excluded as crucial data.

Origin

The British Royal Air Force (RAF) suffered damage to their planes from German anti-aircraft fire during World War II, indicating a need for better armor on their planes. The question of which parts of the plane should be armored was addressed by Hungarian-born mathematician Abraham Wald. Ward opposed the proposal to armor the sections of the planes most hit by bullet fire, saying that the armor should be done on areas that have no bullet holes. This is because planes hit in those areas did not survive the attack, and were thus unable to make it back home.^[1]

On November 12th, 2016, Wikipedia^[2] editor McGeddon added the image of the plane with red dots to illustrate the "In The Military" section of the Wikipedia page for "Survivorship Bias" (seen below). The image is likely based on a diagram created to illustrate Wald's paper, made by Cameron Mill in 2005 (seen below).^[3]

Spread

An early viral iteration of the WWII survivorship bias story was shared by Facebook user Scott Osborn on March 1st, 2019, gathering over 33,000 reactions in four years.^[4]

On October 3rd, 2020, X^[5] user @dysmemic posted the image of the plane alongside a diagram showing corruption around the world, implying that the corruption diagram only shows corruption that has been detected. The post gathered over 18,000 likes in three years (seen below, left). On October 6th, X^[7] user @seecurity posted the image with the caption, "Our online survey showed that all of the students had the required hardware and internet bandwidth to participate in the online courses."

On October 18th, 2020, Redditor^[6] /u/Buenzlitum posted the plane with a caption that read, "Republican approval of trump at an all time high!" The post gathered over 4600 upvotes in three years (seen below, left). On May 21st, 2023, X^[8] user @Duderichy posted a tweet that read, "your 20’s don’t matter bro, college doesn’t matter, just travel and have fun, learning and getting good at things don’t matter, you’ll just magically fall into success fucking around and not focusing it’s so simple bro just have fun," gathering over 9,000 likes in three months (seen below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References