SWEDEN – A gay couple from Germany achieved a first last week as they married on an airplane between Stockholm and New York.
They wed on board a SAS flight, a Scandinavian airline owned by the governments of Norway, Denmark and Sweden, which all recognize gay marriage.
SAS has been conducting heterosexual weddings in the air for years and last year began a competition for gay and lesbian couples to become the first to wed on a plane.
The winning couple was Aleksandar Mijatovic and Shantu Bhattacherjee, who won the competition with 81,640 votes. Their wedding was followed by that of lesbian couple Ewa Tomaszewicz and Gosia Rawin´ska.
The short ceremonies took place over Sweden at around 20,000 feet and were conducted by a registrar from the European Parliament.
Anders Lindström, the PR director of SAS airlines said, “We are extremely proud to be the first airline to host not only the world’s first mid-air same-sex wedding, but both the first gay and first lesbian wedding.
“As the national airline of the world’s three most progressive countries, which were the first to legalize same-sex marriages, we felt it was completely natural to also be the first with this.”
