Of the presidents and prime ministers that have been in plane/helicopter crashes, which ones survived?
George Bush Sr. comes to mind
I expect though you want to qualify that as leaders who were in office at the time
If you want to expand it to presidential candidates, then John McCain survived several.
I don’t think too many people have been both a president and prime minister, so there might not be any. I crack myself up, sometimes.
Anyway, Canada’s Lester B. “Mike” Pearson was in a plane crash during the Great War.
ETA - Now that I think about it, Putin was both a President and a Prime Minister, but was he ever in a plane crash?
In mother Russia President and PM not in plane crash but make presidents plane crash. Maybe. It hasn’t been proven. But a President was in a plane crash.
Gnassingbé Eyadéma, President of Togo, survived a plane crash in 1974.
Obama was involved in a collision between a plane on which he was a passenger and another while they were on the ground during his 2008 campaign. Not exactly a plane crash, however.
Here’s a list of Presidents involved in aircraft accidents.
All the crashes except Eyadema’s were fatal. The only other incidents where the President survived were when Brazilian President Arthur da Costa e Silva surived an emergency landing at Rio de Janeiro in 1967, and Botswana President J.K. Quett Masire survived an missile attack on his Presidential jet by an Angolan MiG in 1988.
Churchill survived a minor plane crash in the days of biplanes when he was learning to fly.
He also got hit by a car in New York, if that helps…
Harold Macmillan’s plane (in which he was a passenger) crashed during the war, and he was quite badly burned.
Disqualified! He bailed out of the plane before it crashed, which is really good planning in my opinion. But his plane crashed without him so it doesn’t count. He seemed to like the parachute ride so much that he jumped out of several other perfectly good airplanes well into his senior years.
Bush Sr. was almost caught by Japanese soldiers after he bailed out of his plane . Other US prisoners captured in that same area were killed and eaten.
Several sites say Bush Sr. survived not one but four plane crashes in WWII, but I haven’t found detail on the other three.
Mariano Rajoy, PM of Spain, survived an helicopter crash in 2005. Cites in Spanish and in English.
He was opposition leader at the time, became PM later. He was accompanied by the President of the Madrid Autonomous Region, Esperanza Aguirre.
Trump’s jet clipped another jet while taxiing on May 12th. There’s weirdly too much hush-hush about it. E.g. they won’t say whether Trump was aboard. Given this was after the NJ rally and returning to FL he clearly was.
The question arises: Define “crash”.
IN 2022 there was an engine failure of the jet Trump was on forcing an emergency landing.
Cf. Final Destination, Death doesn’t seem to be really even trying.
None I can think of from Australia, but later Prime Minister John Gorton was a Hurricane fighter pilot in WWII and crash-landed heavily, which contributed to his famously craggy appearance.