[werftgh]

The astronomer Freeman Dyson was doing similar work for the RAF (I had heard this story attributed to him) Two of his calculations weren't acted on because of illogical users.

Very few bombers crashed because of airframe failures as opposed to enemy attacks. Logically it would make sense to make the aircraft weaker but lighter/cheaper/faster the loss of a few % crashing due to breakups would balance being able to escape enemies faster.

Gunners on bombers very rarely hit incoming fighters, it would make sense to remove some or all of the gunners and instead train them as pilots and build more aircraft. The RAF's main problem was losing skilled crews and gunners were just extra wasted human resource when a plane was shot down.

[evgen]

The wrinkle in this story is that both conclusions were eventually discovered by others as well, acted upon, and eventually became the dominant paradigms by the end of the war (Dyson was doing operations research for RAF Bomber Command and claims to have made the suggestion in regards to cutting weight on Lancasters.) Some of the most successful planes in the war embodied this philosophy before Dyson even enlisted. The most successful light bomber in the war was the De Haviland Mosquito, which was made primarily of wood, usually carried no machine guns, and could outrun every other plane in the sky until the arrival of jet engines.