Love Was in the Air at This Local Couple's Pilot-Inspired Wedding

Before Jake Peters met Lexi, he laid eyes on her airplane. The lifelong pilot had spotted an RV-4 on the tarmac in Lancaster, Ohio. He looked up the tail number (as pilots do) and later saw the same aircraft on Instagram — this time belonging to Lexi Blaes.

From there, one message turned into a meetup, an unexpected brake failure and a backup plan that ultimately launched a lifelong partnership.

“He still flew down to see me,” Lexi says of her grounded plane and shared aviation history. “We just clicked.”

Lexi, a flight instructor and artist, was raised on a grass airfield in Oklahoma. Jake resided south of Canton, on the Beach City, Ohio runway known as 2D7. He’s on his way to instructing, and both dream of operating a flight school.

“We’ve both been flying since long before thinking about driving a car,” says Jake, figuring his first flight was age 8.

Lexi had a thing for an iconic 1946 Piper J-3 Cub, like a Ford Model-T of planes, and Jake knew exactly how to propose. He tucked a hand-painted canvas inside its cockpit, knowing she wouldn’t be able to resist peeking. She opened the door, froze and turned to find him kneeling beside the aircraft.

“She couldn’t stop smiling,” he says of the will-you-marry-me message.

​They swooped into no-frills planning, making gut decisions on the fly. They already knew the venue: the runway and hangar at 2D7. Lexi wore a champagne-toned cocktail dress easy to fly in. She bought it on a whim online, just for fun, before she even met Jake. He wore a suit from Miller's Clothing & Shoes in New Philadelphia. Guests signed a salvaged airplane propeller that the couple found days before the wedding.

“We wanted a genuine ‘this is us’ wedding,” Lexi says.

However, a basic plan turned into 160 guests and 14 airplanes flown in by friends, flight students, coworkers and family. The pastor, a former student of Lexi’s who had just earned his license, flew in to officiate.

Throughout the day, planes taxied in and out. Mid-reception, the couple slipped away for a spontaneous “intermission flight,” looping and rolling in Jake’s RV-4 before returning to the celebration. (They briefed the formation flight in advance.)

​They were swept up in every moment, forgetting some of those landmark wedding “dos” with no regrets, such as the cake cutting.

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“We were having too much fun enjoying each other and our company,” says Lexi, sharing that she even left behind her bouquet.

Their true first dance happened later, alone in the hangar after guests had gone home.

Their advice?

“Be yourself and embrace the chaos,” Lexi says.

“Stay a team,” Jake adds.

Akron-based photographer Aisley Herndon didn’t just document the wedding — she climbed into the back of a homebuilt airplane to shoot it. When Lexi and Jake floated the idea of a formation-flight session, she assumed she’d be on the ground. Instead: Are you afraid of heights? Would you ride in the back?

She was all in.

“I basically folded myself into a ball with one camera,” she says of squeezing into the tiny rear seat.

For 15 minutes, she photographed the couple flying just feet away in their Piper Cub as the planes circled at sunset.

“You could see them smiling back at me mid-flight,” Herndon says. “It was unreal.”

What made the images work, she adds, was trust: “They weren’t worried about posing. They just wanted it to feel like them — adventurous and genuine.”

Before they landed, Lexi’s dad treated her to a few gentle spirals on the way back — a fitting finale to a wedding that was as much an experience as an event.

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