For an embarrassingly long time, I believed gender reveals were a euphemism for birth. Even though this was not correct in the strictest sense, I nevertheless maintain birth is the only true gender reveal. I also don’t get the point of the big showy ones that occur prior to birth that involve painting an entire forest blue or shooting yourself in the face with a gun filled with blanks only to turn the gun around and see IT’S A BOY written across the barrel. I assume it’s for the views, the likes, the hearts, the faves, just like everything else we do these days including but hardly limited to this blog.
And much like my terrible tweets, which are also for the faves, gender reveals seem to have entered an arms race of one-upmanship in which each successive gender reveal must be grander than the last. It is a dangerous set of Darwinian circumstances as people ignore basic common sense in pursuit of the faves. In the end, folks get hurt. And specifically in the case of gender reveals, they are often pregnant folks.
Which brings us to the events of September 7, 2019. Twilight was settling upon the Texas panhandle farmland just outside of Turkey, Texas, a town of some 421 people. A low hum could be heard in the distance as a bright yellow cropduster, an AT-502B with a Pratt & Whitney engine buzzing across the horizon. It was 7:30 p.m., too early for my terrible tweets but prime time for filming the most dramatic gender reveal the town of Turkey, Texas had ever seen.
Flying at a low altitude, the pilot dumped 350 gallons of pink water. Congratulations, it’s a girl!
And then, according to the National Transportation Safety Board investigation records, “the airplane immediately stalled” and crashed.
The NTSB has not issued a final report yet, so it’s not clear precisely what caused the plane to stall. Approximately 275 gallons of water remained in the hopper, and the pilot reported there were no mechanical failures or malfunctions prior to the stall.
What could it have been? The NTSB investigator notes only one anomaly: “He added that there were 2 persons on board the 1 seat airplane.”
Now, I do not know anything about flying an airplane that cannot be learned from Microsoft Flight Simulator 95. But I do have a slight hunch the act of flying a plane may perhaps be slightly more difficult when two people are crammed into a cockpit meant for one person.
Fortunately, and quite miraculously, the NTSB investigators reported only minor injuries to the two people inside.
Please, for the love of God, do not put yourself in mortal danger to reveal your baby’s gender. It’s not worth it. Not even for the faves.
[H/T Steve Trimble]