Peenie Wallie: Insanely Cool Story

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September 24, 2011

Insanely Cool Story

Today, I stumbled across this little gem:

"In case you weren't aware, I am a military operations research analyst for the U.S. Army. One of the stories associated with the origins of my field of work involves a study of Royal Air Force bombers returning to England after missions over the Continent during WWII. Time and time again the same parts of aircraft were pockmarked with holes from enemy anti-aircraft fire. A study was convened to determine ways to reinforce those areas of the aircraft in order to protect the crew. Prior to the study's conclusion Patrick Blackett, an experimental physicist and early operations research proponent, offered the seemingly counterintuitive idea that the focus was completely wrong. Instead of looking at where the holes were, they should concentrate on where the holes weren't. Since every part of the aircraft was equally likely to be hit by enemy fire, the real threat to the safety of the crew was in those areas of returning aircraft that almost never saw damage-his idea being that, when damage occurred in those areas, the aircraft likely didn't return.

Blackett's mathematically based intuition, was of course, correct. The areas of returning aircraft that exhibited comparatively little damage were places like cockpits and fuel tanks. The larger lesson was that sometimes what we see obscures our ability to see what isn't there.

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