Passenger injured as pilot slowed plane at low altitude to ‘dump 350 gallons of pink water’ in stunt gone badly wrong

This article is more than 10 months old

This article is more than 10 months old

In another instance of a “gender reveal” stunt gone badly wrong, a small plane crashed in Texas after “dump[ing] about 350 gallons of pink water” to indicate that a friend of the pilot was going to have a daughter.

Why the mother who started gender-reveal parties regrets them Read more

According to a National Transportation Safety Board report into the crash, which happened near the town of Turkey on 7 September, “the pilot reported, that while maneuvering at a low altitude in an aerial applicator airplane, he dumped about 350 gallons of pink water for a gender reveal.

“The airplane ‘got too slow’, aerodynamically stalled, impacted terrain and came to rest inverted.”

The pilot reported no mechanical failures or malfunctions before the plane crashed.

The NTSB report added: “The Federal Aviation Administration inspector … [said] there were two persons on board the single-seat airplane.”

The pilot was not injured. The passenger suffered minor injuries.

Gender reveal parties let expecting parents reveal whether they are going to have a boy or a girl. Stunts gone wrong have become a staple of online reporting.

In Iowa in October, a 56-year-old grandmother was killed when a device meant to shoot out coloured powder exploded instead.

In Arizona in 2017, a man fired a rifle at a target that exploded, releasing blue powder. It also started a wildfire that burned 73 sq miles of mostly Forest Service land. The man was ordered to pay nearly $8m in restitution.

Earlier this year, Jenna Karvunidis, a mother of three who in 2008 was one of the first people to hold a gender reveal, told the Guardian she “had released something bad into the world”.

Aside from accidents, Karvunidis said she regretted the focus of such events on traditional notions of gender.

“I started to realize that nonbinary people and trans people were feeling affected by this,” she said, “and I started to feel bad.”