Flight Cancellation Leads To Seven-Mile-High Wedding

Normally when you walk down the aisle of a Southwest 737 you’re unfolding your legs or going to the bathroom, but Pam Patterson was heading for a future with the love of her life. Up at the galley, where streamers fashioned of toilet paper softened the industrial practicality of the space, a fellow passenger and ordained minister waited with the groom as a professional wedding photographer shot with his cellphone. Another passenger shot video and somewhere between Dallas and Las Vegas Patterson and her fiancé Jeremy Salda sealed the deal at 36,000 feet.

According to the Washington Post, the romantic saga began in Oklahoma City where the happy couple, who had planned to get married in Mexico in August, decided they couldn’t wait and hopped a flight, dressed in their wedding gear, to Las Vegas for a chapel wedding on the strip. Their connecting flight from Dallas/Fort Worth was canceled and with some help from Chris Kligora, the minister, sprinted for another flight at Love Field. The plan at that point was for Kligora to marry them in front of the Bellagio fountains.

As the trio boarded, the crew of Southwest 2690 greeted them and Patterson proposed the idea of a seven-mile-high wedding. The crew, the groom and the minister agreed and during the climb the flight attendants prepared the cabin with the toilet paper altar and the passengers lighting the way with their call buttons. Everyone on the half-full flight got in the spirit. “It’s been a long couple of years with the pandemic, and we wanted to have some fun with it,” said flight attendant Julie Reynolds, who became an impromptu maid of honor.