Ah, the curse of knowledge. The author is clearly very experienced in his domain, so when a daft-but-useful meme happened to stray across into an area he knows about he felt empowered to refute it. The problem is that the meme, like most memes, is a wildly simplified abstraction for something else, not really a story about planes, and the story at its heart is more like a parable than a factual statement. Everyone who hears about the plane and the dots and the armour eventually understands it's about looking at a piece of evidence and realizing you need to look at the whole picture instead of what's immediately apparent (eg "planes that get shot" versus "planes that get shot <i>and survive</i>").<p>The author knows more about plane survivability than most, but couldn't see past the facts to understand the meaning.