This (the crash, not the revocations) might be the worst, most embarrassing outcome for the FAA. Had the stunt gone completely right they could have just put the hammer down on the pilots and said "it could have gone wrong and people could have got hurt!". But we got to see what happened when things went wrong. We saw, even in failure, no one got hurt, and it doesn't seem like anyone was close to getting hurt. Is this luck or were the pilots right the entire time, planning for failure and ensuring no one would be harmed even if they failed? Still doesn't excuse them for going forward despite the exemption being rejected, but a successful failure raises doubt as to the FAA's ability to evaluate risk, which only compounds the current Trent Palmer situation.
They crashed a plane! Which means they had completely lost control! What was stopping the plane from randomly pitching up and flying off towards people?
This seems to prove the opposite, that it was a dangerous stunt that the faa were right to deny and very luckily nobody was hurt
I am going to assume you made the comment from position of ignorance on how they executed the stunt. They used a very very large airbrake to slow the aircraft down after pitching down into a near vertical dive and letting prop windmill. The risk of the plane flying away was negligible.
In fact a lot of engineering went into that airbrake!
Whatever we think of the stunt and its aftermath, Red Bull did make a very interesting page and video about the engineering and testing that went into it:
