That’s who I was going to mention. According to Wikipedia, she also survived tuberculosis as a child, and a collision while working on RMS Olympic (although Olympic didn’t sink and returned to port).
Edited: Never mind. I thought Violet was a guy.
Sure, but to get back to the part you quoted, do you really believe that the CIA and/or George HW Bush and Bill Clinton cared enough about Fidel Castro or Cuba between 1988 and 2000 to try to assassinate him at all, much less the claimed 37 times?
I find that extremely hard to believe. Fidel Castro probably wasn’t even an irritant after the USSR dissolved- they probably cared less about him than they did Osama Bin Laden, and they didn’t care much about OBL, clearly.
Race car driver and WWI flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker survived several harrowing mishaps.
The fabric of his plane’s wing stripped off in flight, nearly causing a crash.
In 1941 he was a passenger on an Eastern Airlines flight that crashed near Atlanta and he was trapped in the wreckage. According to his autobiography, “While he was still conscious and in terrible pain, he was left behind while some ambulances carried away the bodies of the dead. When he arrived at the hospital, his injuries were so severe that the emergency surgeons and physicians left him for dead for some time. The doctors instructed their assistants to “take care of the live ones”. Rickenbacker’s injuries included a fractured skull, a shattered left elbow with a crushed nerve, a paralyzed left hand, several broken ribs, a crushed hip socket, a pelvis broken in two places, a severed nerve in his left hip, a broken left knee, and his left eyeball was out of its socket.”
In 1942 he was on a B-17 flight in the Pacific, carrying a message to Gen. MacArthur when the plane went off course, ran out of fuel and had to ditch in the Pacific. He and 6 other passengers survived on life rafts for 21 (or 24) days until being rescued.
There was also a U.S. President who survived multiple impeachments, but I’m not going there.
Kind of does. OTOH, Adolf Hitler survived 42 known assassination attempts. As the linked Wikipedia article points out, “the true number cannot be accurately determined due to an unknown number of undocumented cases”. Could easily have been a lot more we just don’t have documentation of. I personally think it’s unlikely that the total true number hit triple digits without more of them being documented.
I’m pretty sure that most of those “attempts” were proposals that were dismissed or failed in the preparation stages far short of ever getting near Castro.
Charles de Gaulle is another contender; there were 31 attempts to assassinate him (the most spectacular one being on August 22nd, 1962 in Petit-Clamart — he got out alive thanks to the skill of his driver and to his car, a Citroën DS, that in spite of being hit fourteen times and having two tires blown out with machine gun fire, was able to hit 120 kilometers per hour getting away from the kill zone; from then on he refused to use any other car type).
I remember this happening, but had to look it up on Wikipedia to get the name.
Jane Dornacker was a traffic reporter who was aboard two unrelated crashes of the helicopters leased to WNBC Radio, approximately six months apart. She survived the first crash, on April 18, 1986, but was killed in the second.
(bold mine)
is it cruel to call her a thread-related underperformer?
Maybe. Both times it happened, she was transmitting. At least the first time, when she survived, the tape of her talking through the crash got a lot of air play. It was a very public event. And because she was a comedian, she had a bunch of interviews after the crash.
She said that she was asked if she could swim well and if not, if that scared her. Her canned reply was that she could swim well, in general, but had never practiced swimming with 4,000 pounds strapped to her waist.
Is there someone who’s survived two or more helicopter crashes? (Into the bay. . . while transmitting?)
What I gathered from the thread is that people need to have certain careers to rack up a disaster record, and even then it’s of only 1 type. Nobody is (un)lucky enough to own a more ‘diverse’ record.
Like the idea of having someone sprinkle thallium in his shoes, so his beard would fall out?
(One reason this didn’t go any further is that enough thallium to make a man’s beard fall out would kill him first.)
Not helicopters, but there’s a section in Chuck Yeager’s autobiography with an odd bit of trivia. He’s a rare pilot who has logged more landings than takeoffs. Twice he had to bail out of planes (a takeoff without a landing), but most of his research flights were carried to altitude in a bomber and then released (a landing without a takeoff).
One of his bailouts was in a fighter during WWII. The other was during an attempt to set an altitude record in a modified F-104. He also survived a near-accident in the X-2; the plane lost control and tumbled, his head cracked the canopy, but he regained control and glid to a landing. There was also a famous occasion when he fell off a horse and broke two ribs.
If we specify “single season” vice lifetime, Ernest Hemingway survived two plane accidents in two days (one a crash, and one an explosion on takeoff).