Survivorship Bias
You are working at an airport and keep receiving reports on damaged or even broken airplanes.
You manage to receive the following information from the given reports:
crashed airplanes (exploded without further information)
all damaged, but returning airplanes have their wings and only their wings damaged
A credible engineer explains to you:
Adding more material to a specific part of an airplane, makes this part less likely to break.
You can only add a limited amount of material to the airplane, as it would be too heavy to start otherwise.
You are asked to help the engineer fix issues relating to the airplane.
To which parts of the airplane model would you recommend the engineer to add more material to to minimize the chance of an airplane crash?
Note: If you add materials to more parts, less material will be added to each of the parts, as if you added material to only one of the parts.
Inspiration: Veritasium Video
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1 solution
As all damaged returning airplanes only show damage to the wings. This shows, that they can have damage to the wings. Therefore this part is sufficient and needs no further material. Damage to other parts of the plane could cause airplanes to crash without any data being received. The material would, therefore, be most useful at all parts, but the wings.