In the minutes leading up to first pitch Wednesday night, a flyover featuring a quartet of F-35 Lightning IIs from the 421st Fighter Squadron based at the Hill Air Force Base in Utah emerged from behind the left-field scoreboard and zipped over Target Field.

Capt. Parker Jax — a younger brother of Twins pitcher Griffin Jax — and his wife Capt. Chandler Jax were among the pilots involved. The flyover completed, Capt. Carson Jax, Parker’s twin, then took the mound to throw out a first pitch caught by Griffin.

The Jaxes’ parents were in attendance, in addition to a host of other family members. Griffin Jax, himself a captain in the Air Force Reserve, estimated it’s been a few years since his whole family had been able to get together, so Wednesday’s reunion at Target Field carried some extra significance.

To top it all off, Griffin Jax pitched two scoreless innings in the Twins’ 6-3 win over the Los Angeles Angels on Wednesday night.

“It’s special,” Griffin Jax said.

The idea for the “special” day for the Jax family, Griffin believes, first came about during spring training when he mentioned it to Twins senior vice president of communications and public affairs Dustin Morse. The original idea was to have it occur before a playoff game, but the Air Force needed a guaranteed date to plan around, so that idea was scrapped.

It was too close to Opening Day — another day that features a flyover — to execute, so they settled on Wednesday’s game as part of the Twins’ Sept. 11 remembrance ceremony.

“A lot of mission planning went into this,” Parker Jax said. “ ... Last night we landed probably about 2 p.m. We got all our mission planning done for the day off and then we headed over here, got to catch the game and then woke up this morning, did it all again. Redid the mission planning, rebriefed the whole thing. Got out to the jets this morning. We were probably holding about 30 miles north of Target Field for about 30, 45 minutes just to make sure we got the timing down right.”

While the Jax brothers had a grandfather who served in Vietnam, Griffin said there was no other family military experience until he was recruited by the Air Force Academy out of high school. The Jax family lived about an hour north of the academy’s Colorado Springs campus, which helped lead the boys there, as well.

“They’re a lot smarter than I am so they took it a lot more seriously,” Griffin Jax said. “They knew baseball probably wasn’t going to be in their cards for any career so they knew going there that it was going to be a real possibility to fly, and they took advantage of it.”

Parker is stationed in Utah, and Carson is at Travis Air Force Base in California, where he flies the C-5M Super Galaxy. With all three brothers in different areas with busy schedules, it makes it hard for the trio to see each other often.

But on Wednesday, their plan all came together perfectly, making for a memorable day for the Jax family.

Carson admitted to having some nerves before his first pitch; Griffin said he thought it was a “pretty good first throw.” And though Parker was piloting a plane, he said he thought his twin might have had the harder job.

“Carson had to be out there in front of all the fans,” Parker Jax said. “It didn’t matter if we were early or late, you know, as long as the jets flew over at some point today, I think everyone was going to be happy.”