In World War II, there were a lot of planes that used to come down due to anti-aircraft fire. Some of them were managing to come back to the air base, but a lot of them were getting lost. So, the Air Force decided to put together a small team of Air Force Officers, Math geniuses, scientists and engineers in order to create a small consulting team to find out what they could do protect these planes. What they actually wanted to do, is put an armour around the plane. The planes could only take that much of extra weight, so they had to decide where exactly on the plane to put the armour without affecting aerodynamic balance. They identified all the bullet holes per square feet across the length of the plane and realised that the tail section had 1.98 bullet holes per square feet whereas the nose section has 1.1 bullet holes per square feet. The Air Force officer said, “We should obviously, put armour at the tail end section as that’s where more holes were”. However, there was a Math genius called Abraham Wald who said quite the opposite. To everyone’s surprise he said, “We need to put the armour in the nose section of the aircraft, because we are measuring planes that have come back. The planes that have high number of bulletholes in the nose section never survived. We need to protect the nose section.” What a wonderful story! Business Points (Tags) #Obviousisnotalwaystheanswer #Don’tjumptoconclusions #Thinkoutsidethebox #CreativeThinking #LogicalThinking #Bias #AirForce #War #BulletHoles #Armour #AbrahamWald
