Airborne Wedding Has Couple Flying High
UK Couple, Minister Strap Selves To Wings Of 3 Different Planes For Ceremony
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Play CBS Video Video Wedding In The Skies Darren McWalters and Katie Hodgson decided to have a highly unusual wedding ceremony. Mark Phillips reports on the couple and their decision to get married while strapped to separate airplanes.
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Video With This Wing, I Thee Wed "Caught On Tape": Three biplanes took off over Glouchestershire, England, with bride Katie Hodgson, groom Darren McWalters and their vicar for a wedding ceremony performed in mid-air.
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Vicar George Brigham, right, conducts the marriage ceremony of Darren McWalters, left, and Katie Hodgson, as they fly over the English countryside near Rendcomb airfield, England, Aug. 5, 2008. (AP Photo/ Barry Batchelor-pa)
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Vicar George Brigham, centre, poses with Darren McWalters, left, and Katie Hodgson, after conducting their wedding, as they flew over the English countryside near Rendcomb airfield, England, Aug. 5, 2008. (AP Photo/ Barry Batchelor-pa)
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Katie Hodgson, 23, came up the aisle at about a hundred miles an hour on the top wing of red-and-white plane operated by Team Guinot, a group of stunt pilots. Groom Darren McWalters, 24, flew by her side on an identical plane, while Rev. George Bringham - flying ahead of the couple - married them over an airborne communications system. If ever a marriage was begun on a wing and a prayer - actually, six wings and a prayer - this was it, reports CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips.
McWalters is a fitness instructor with a taste for extreme sports. He had proposed to Hodgson, a postwoman, while they trekked through the Brazilian rainforest, reports Phillips.
Sky News television footage of the ceremony showed the bride's dressed fluttering wildly in foul weather as the three shouted to make themselves heard over the din of the aircraft.
"I ask you therefore, will you love her, honor and keep her and be faithful to her so long as you both shall live?" Bringham yelled.
"I will!" McWalters yelled back.
The airplanes sent out trails of white smoke as the couple belted out their vows about 1,000 feet above the ground. Special microphones relayed the ceremony to Rendcomb Airfield near the English city of Cirencester - 90 miles west of London - where the wedding guests were waiting. Wind and rain eventually cut the flight short, but the couple said they had a blast.
Hodgson said that as a girl she never would have imagined she would wed on the wing of an airplane.
"As I got older I became more adventurous," she said, before adding: "I bring the adventurous side out of Darren - he used to be scared of heights."
McWalters told Sky: "We are a bit crazy together ... so we wanted something that suited."
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