Planes parked in the Springbank airport on the first stop of a cross-country tour. (Scott Dippel/CBC)

More than 100 small planes took off from several Metro Vancouver airports Friday morning, beginning a cross-country journey to mark a century of flight in Canada.

Most of the planes departed from the Boundary Bay airport, south of Vancouver, for the 10-day journey, hopscotching across Canada to Nova Scotia. The event ends July 28 in Baddeck, N.S., where the first powered flight in Canada took place on Feb. 23, 1909.

Although the mass flight may be the largest group of non-military aircraft ever to travel together across Canadian skies, organizers said the planes won't be in formation. Instead, they will take off at roughly one-minute intervals and fly in single file.

The first of 30 stops was made near Calgary Friday afternoon at Springbank airport.

John Lovelace, who helped organize the event, said the pilots had a smooth trip over the Rocky Mountains.

"I kept thinking to myself this is too easy," he said. "We're always concerned about the weather – clearing the rocks – because we can deal with the weather better on the flatlands; we can go around it or whatever but we don't have those options when we have just a number of mountain passes to go through. We're able to just clear, just go over top of everything. It was great."

The pilots will remain in Calgary until Sunday morning, when they take off for Brandon, Man.