Puzzlers: Let's not go into that other wild blue yonder. Save the planes!

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Note: This post takes its inspiration from a puzzler on the radio show Car Talk on NPR aired 8/21/06. Car Talk hosts weekly puzzlers that are often car or math-related.

Your country is at war and your planes keep on being shot down. You are called in to determine what parts of the plane to reinforce and make impenetrable to bullets. You can look at all the planes that have been shot at and returned to base. Assuming shots at the plane were distributed evenly around the plane, what do you look for to tell you where to reinforce?

How is this relevant? Engineers are called in to both design things and fix them when they break. We must be able to target parts of a product for improvement and balance the cost of that improvement with the benefit that the improvement provides. Science researchers also must first identify a problem and look at evidence that may lead to a solution.

Similarly to this problem, sometimes scientists study things that they cannot directly see. They can only see the effects of the phenomena on a limited set of data. It is important to be able to make sense of the data and obtain from it all that is possible.

Note: the answer is in the comments.