This has actually come up: in World War II (citation in Pinker’s “How the Mind Works”), bomber pilots making runs on Japan had a 1 in 4 chance of survival.
I’ll need to see that citation, actually; it couldn’t possibly have been a 75% fatality rate per mission. (When my father says a number is bogus, he’s usually right.) Even Doolittle’s raid, in which the planes did not have enough fuel to return from Japan but instead had to land in Japan-occupied China, had a better survival rate than one in four: of the 80 airmen involved, 4 were killed and 8 were captured. (Of the eight who were captured, four died before the war ended.)
Correction- it’s for a pilot’s entire quota of missions, not just one:
Decades before Tooby and Cosmides spelled out this logic, the psychologist Anatol Rapoport illustrated it with a paradox from World War II. (He believed the scenario was true but was unable to verify it.) At a bomber base in the Pacific, a flier had only a twenty-five percent chance of surviving his quota of missions. Someone calculated that if the fliers carried twice as many bombs, a mission could be carried out with half as many flights. But the only way to increase the payload was to reduce the fuel, which meant that the planes would have to fly on one-way missions. If the fliers would be willing to draw lots and take a one-in-two chance of flying off to a certain death instead of hanging on to their three-in-four chance of flying off to an unpredictable death, they would double their chance of survival; only half of them would die instead of three-quarters. Needless to say, it was never implemented. Few of us would accept such an offer, though it is completely fair and would save many lives, including, possibly, our own. The paradox is an intriguing demonstration that our mind is equipped to volunteer for a risk of death in a coalition but only if we do not know when death will come.
Yeah, if it’s for an entire quota of missions, the math doesn’t work out—each pilot normally would fly several missions, making the death rate per flight less than 50%, so it wouldn’t be a good deal.
I’ll need to see that citation, actually; it couldn’t possibly have been a 75% fatality rate per mission. (When my father says a number is bogus, he’s usually right.) Even Doolittle’s raid, in which the planes did not have enough fuel to return from Japan but instead had to land in Japan-occupied China, had a better survival rate than one in four: of the 80 airmen involved, 4 were killed and 8 were captured. (Of the eight who were captured, four died before the war ended.)
Correction- it’s for a pilot’s entire quota of missions, not just one:
Yeah, if it’s for an entire quota of missions, the math doesn’t work out—each pilot normally would fly several missions, making the death rate per flight less than 50%, so it wouldn’t be a good deal.