I see pictures and hear stories of aircraft struggling back to base with hundreds of bullet holes or missing engines/parts of wings or shrapnel inside the wings. How did they stay in the air after all that anti air fire and why are modern aircraft weaker than them (Iran shot down one easily)?
In: Engineering
You’re taking about [Survivorship Bias](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Survivorship-bias.png), for which there is a noted example specifically related to this topic.
During WW2 they were examining the parts of the planes that most often got damaged to figure out where to put additional armor – initially planning to add it to the most damaged areas. Then someone pointed out they were only able to assess the damage from the planes that *returned* from missions, so the additional armor should instead go on locations where they rarely saw damage on returned planes – because damage to those areas meant a plane got shot down.
So – a plane can take a lot of damage to some parts, but almost no damage to others. The image linked above gives an idea of where the critical areas were – mostly in the cockpit, around the engines and between the pilot and the tail wings.
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