Twin pilots met in the sky over the Pacific.
On a Dec. 4 training flight in Japan, Air Force Capt. Jordan Wesemann was at the controls of his KC-135 tanker aircraft as his twin brother, Capt. Jared Wesemann, maneuvered his F-35 fighter jet up to refuel.
It was the first time the two brothers had connected — literally in this case — during an operational flight in their careers as Air Force pilots. Jordan Wesemann is stationed at Kadena Air Force Base as an instructor pilot on the Air Force refueling plane, while Jared deployed there for an exercise from his home base of Hill Air Force Base, Utah.
Both brothers remained in Japan this week and were not immediately able to speak about the flight, but their father told Task & Purpose about the parallel paths the two took toward flying for the Air Force.
Andreas Wesemann was himself an Air Force tanker pilot, he told Task & Purpose, though rather than “pass gas” to high-flying jets like Jordan now does, he spent his career in the down-low flying world of Air Force search and rescue, flying HC-130 tankers to refuel rescue helicopters on long-distance missions. His career meant the twins grew up immersed in the service’s flying culture.
“I’ve been preparing them all their life for this,” Andreas Wesemann told Task & Purpose. “They got to see me fly and wear a flight suit so aviation was always in their mind.”
Twin brothers follow similar paths
The twins went to high school in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and met a variety of different pilots while their father worked at the Air Force Academy. Andreas Wesemann. The two eventually both attended the school, graduating in 2017. They also joined the school’s precision parachute team, Wings of Blue. The boys were featured on the team’s social media in a 2016 Facebook post, which gave some fun facts about the two, including the fact that they both speak Mandarin Chinese.
According to their father, the twins took Chinese in High School and at the academy, which they used on a two-year Mormon church service mission in Taiwan. The parachute team Facebook post also mentioned that the twins speak a “secret twin language,” which Andreas Wesemann confirmed.
“It’s not just that they speak Chinese in front of me, but they have a little bit of communication that even I can’t figure out,” he said.
Top Stories This Week
Andreas Wesemann said there was always a “friendly competitive nature between the two” but that Jordan, the KC-135 pilot, had “always wanted” to go to the Academy while Jared was a “little bit quieter about it” and “wanted to make sure he did it for himself, and not because everybody else was expecting him to follow dad.”
In the end, the two chose their own paths as pilots. Andreas Wesemann said Jordan wanted to start a family and spend time in the Pacific, so he decided his best chance was to become a tanker pilot. Jared, on the other hand, was chosen for the service’s Euro-NATO Joint Jet Flying Program at Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas, which trains fighter pilots for NATO missions.
A final flight over Japan
The brothers’ connection came during a night flight.
“Night air-to-air refueling is one of the most challenging tasks we do,” Jared Wesmenn said in an Air Force release. “You have to be perfectly in sync, which, of course, we’ve been our whole lives.”
According to the Air Force release, Jordan has been based in Kadena — which regularly hosts major air campaign exercises in the Pacific — for the last three years, where he trained and mentored aircrews with the 909th Air Refueling Squadron. Towards the end of his Japan stint, Jared’s unit at Hill sent a unit to participate in an exercise there.
The two made the connection on what would be Jordan’s final mission at Kadena before PCSing to a new assignment.
Andreas Wesemann found out his sons had pulled off the flight by accident when one mentioned it. He was used to not asking too many questions of his F-35 pilot son, who usually didn’t spill the secrets on where or how long he would be gone on deployment.
“It accidentally leaked because Jared was eating dinner with his brother, and so I found out, oh, I guess I know where Jared is deployed,” Andreas Wesemann said. “I didn’t know anything at all, and I intentionally did not ask because I know better. However, there was always the chance that, if he’s going to be deployed for a month at a location where his brother flies, chances are that they’re going to make it work.”
The Wesemann twins were the latest military family members to reunite in the air as tanker and fighter pilots. In 2024, a brother-sister duo met 25,000 feet in the air on a refueling mission over the Midwestern U.S. between an Air Force KC-46A Pegasus tanker and a Navy EA-18G Growler.
“It’s an honor to share the skies with you,” Jordan told Jared during the flight, according to the Air Force release. “You look and sound the part, brother. Thanks for celebrating this moment with me.”
