A single-engine plane crashed while trying to dump pink water for a gender reveal in Texas in September. Photo / Supplied
A single-engine plane crashed while trying to dump pink water for a gender reveal in Texas in September. Photo / Supplied
Expectant parents keep coming up with more elaborate ways to announce the sex of their baby. But they are also getting more dangerous.
A plane crashed to the ground and one of its occupants was injured when an expectant couple's gender reveal took a disastrous turn.
The cropdusting plane was used to dump about 1300 litres of pink water over a field in Texas in September, according a preliminary report by the US National Transportation Safety Board.
The pilot, Raj Horan, 49, who was flying with a passenger, was carrying out the gender reveal for a friend in the city of Turkey, northwest of Dallas.
But the single-engine plane "got too slow", according to the safety board's documents, before it aerodynamically stalled and crashed to the ground, flipping on its back.
The plane sustained heavy damage, including the right wing, and the passenger received minor injuries.
The pilot told investigators there were "no pre-impact mechanical failures or malfunctions" with the plane.
Gender reveal parties are a popular trend in which expectant couples and loved ones discover the sex of the baby, usually through a theatric stunt that reveals pink for a girl and blue for a boy. But the September 7 crash in Texas is the latest example of these celebrations going badly wrong.
A gender reveal near Tuscon, Arizona in 2017 sparked a bushfire that blazed for a week. Photo / AP
Last month, a woman was killed at a gender reveal party in Iowa by an explosion caused by a homemade device designed to shoot coloured powder into the air. Police said the couple's family had inadvertently created a pipe bomb, which blasted debris 30m away, killing the 56-year-old woman.
A Gold Coast dad-to-be was dragged from a ball of flames last year during a failed attempt to pull off a "burnout" gender reveal, which involved a car fitted with special smoking tyres to release pink or blue smoke.
The man was convicted in June of one count of dangerous operation of a motor vehicle after a drone captured his black Holden car bursting into flames during the burnout.
The incident prompted police to warn about the dangers of burnout gender reveals.
Also in June, an expectant dad was injured in the crotch when a party popper exploded during a dramatic gender reveal that was captured in viral footage in Tennessee.
And last year, a gender reveal in Arizona involving a rifle that shot at colourful powder packets went wrong, sparking a major fire that burned more than 18,000 hectares and took fire crews a week to extinguish. The man who fired the rifle was made to pay more than $355,000 in damages.
