I think this needs its own cognitive term, it's not a survivorship or selection bias, it's just skipping the selection entirely and just focusing on the sample. So here people go "This plane is an outlier, there must be something special about it", as opposed to "We would just be talking about another missing plane instead". Or in the immortal words of Tim Minchin "If I didn't have you, someone else would do"

It has survived against being found; that term seems to fit without much torturing of interpretation.