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.
A new twist on the Millenial craze of “destination weddings.”
Congratulations and best wishes!
I agree with Yars. A nice post-pandemic story. Now I HAVE to ask the question … was this union consummated aboard or … ?? 🙂 What fun.
Congratulations! Great to see people actually having fun in spite of the commercial air travel setting.
Only on SWA. Would never have happened on any other airline. At least not with that much fun and flare from the crew.
I don’t understand the DFW connection as SWA doesn’t fly into DFW, but LUV.
They were originally connecting at DFW on another airline, but that connecting flight was cancelled. So they drove from DFW to DAL to hop on a LUV flight instead.
Carnac the Magnificent : “Mexico, Vegas chapple, 7 miles high.”
Name three things where you wake up with a 1st wife.