About this site
Why This Site Exists
It started with an image. A diagram of a WWII bomber, scattered with red dots. Someone shared it online, and people kept asking the same question: what does this actually mean?
The image that keeps circulating
The plane with red dots appears in textbooks, PowerPoint slides, YouTube videos, Reddit threads, and Twitter feeds. It's used to illustrate a concept called survivorship bias — one of the most important and widely misunderstood ideas in statistics and decision-making.
But most versions of the story are incomplete. They show you the image, say the word "survivorship bias," and move on. Very few actually explain the mechanism: why is what you don't see more important than what you do see?
PlaneRedDots.com was built to close that gap — to be the best, clearest, and most accessible explanation of the concept, starting from the image itself and building up to a real understanding of how the bias works and where it hides today.
What you'll find here
The Problem
The historical context — why WWII bombers were being shot down and the impossible armoring dilemma.
The Insight
Abraham Wald's counterintuitive recommendation — and why it was correct.
The Legacy
How survivorship bias shows up in investing, business, medicine, and everyday decisions.
The Simulation
An interactive tool that lets you experience the bias firsthand — before you can name it.
The Quiz
Six real-world scenarios to test whether you can now spot survivorship bias in the wild.
A note on accuracy
The historical account on this site is based on real events. Abraham Wald was a real mathematician who worked for the Statistical Research Group (SRG) at Columbia University during World War II. His work on aircraft vulnerability analysis was genuinely influential in changing how the military thought about data and decision-making.
Some details of the story have been simplified for clarity — the full mathematical treatment of Wald's analysis is significantly more complex than the narrative here suggests. If you want to go deeper, the References page lists the academic sources and further reading.