Abraham Wald's Work on Aircraft Survivability

While he was a member of the Statistical Research Group (SRG), Abraham Wald worked on the problem of estimating the vulnerability of aircraft, using data obtained from survivors. This work was published as a series of SRG memoranda and was used in World War II and in the wars in Korea and Vietnam. The memoranda were recently reissued by the Center for Naval Analyses. This article is a condensation and exposition of Wald's work, in which his ideas and methods are described. In the final section, his main results are reexamined in the light of classical statistical theory and more recent work.