On 8 June 1934, Russell Lent and Margaret Littlewood of Granville Ferry, Nova Scotia, took off from the Charlottetown area for one of the more unusual episodes in Pictou Island history: they were married in an airplane while circling Pictou Island.
A wedding above Nova Scotia
The reason for flying over Pictou Island was legal rather than romantic geography. The couple had a Nova Scotia marriage licence, so the ceremony needed to occur over Nova Scotia. Pilot Walter Fowler flew the aircraft from Prince Edward Island across the Strait. Rev. J. G. Wakeling performed the ceremony, and Walter Grant, manager of the Island Telephone Company and president of the PEI Flying Club, acted as witness.
Island landscape context; not a photograph of the 1934 wedding. Andrea Rankin Sibley collection
The flight and ceremony
A later aviation account describes the party leaving Upton Airfield in a small Fairchild aircraft at 10 a.m. Fowler followed the Prince Edward Island coast, crossed the Strait and circled Pictou Island while the vows were exchanged and the documents signed. The aircraft returned to Upton shortly before noon.
Two altitudes in the record
Accounts differ on the altitude. Walter Fowler recalled the aircraft at about 5,000 feet when the engine was throttled back for the ceremony; a later Prince Edward Island aviation account says it climbed from 5,000 to 7,000 feet before the vows.
A reported Maritime first
The event was widely described afterward as the first airborne wedding in the Maritimes. A 1935 newspaper retrospective went further, calling it the first wedding solemnized in the air over Canadian territory. Those are contemporary and reported claims; establishing an absolute Canadian first would require a broader national aviation-history review.
