A five-year-old in Ridgecrest looked up.
It was 1968. The boy was outside his house on Fowler Street, playing with toy airplanes, when an F-8 Crusader came over the ridge and turned toward the China Lake airfield.
He'd never seen anything like it.
The Navy was already in the house. His father, a supply officer, had arrived at China Lake that same year. His mother would later work in the base telecommunications branch in the 1970s.
He didn't understand any of it. He only understood the jet overhead.
"It was like having a calling," Anderson. "I geared everything I did from then on toward flying fighters in the Navy."
The calling became Ian Anderson's flight plan.
Burroughs High School. Navy ROTC at UCLA. A commission in 1985. Naval Flight Officer wings at Pensacola in 1987.
Anderson didn't fly the Tomcat alone. Nobody did. In the F-14, the pilot flew from the front seat. The radar intercept officer fought from the back, running the radar, weapons and sensors that gave the Tomcat its long arm.
The Navy sent him to Naval Air Station Miramar. He stayed nine years.
"It was awesome," Anderson said. "Living in San Diego, living my dream job of flying fighters."
He flew all three models of the Tomcat. He was among the first aircrew trained to use the F-14 in the air-to-ground role, the Bombcat. TOPGUN followed. So did the F-14D training syllabus, built from the ground up.
Then came the demonstration team.
For two years, Anderson flew airshows across the country, showing taxpayers what the new Tomcat could do. "It was the closest I'll ever come to getting the rock star experience," Anderson said.
In November 1993, the team flew China Lake's 50th anniversary show. Anderson returned in the back seat of a Tomcat, over the same desert where he'd first looked up.
Once, he'd watched from the ground. Now his parents watched him.
It looked like the boy from Fowler Street had made it up there.
Getting up there didn't mean he got to stay on the path he'd drawn.
In the late 1990s, the Navy moved Anderson out of the Tomcat community and into the EA-6B Prowler, built to jam enemy radar, not shoot down enemy aircraft. He didn't volunteer. The Navy reassigned him.
"When I got the news, it devastated me," Anderson said.
Naval aviation runs on a structured path, and Anderson had been on it. One set of orders moved him off the path he'd been chasing since he was five.
The Prowler took him where the Tomcat never could. He became operations department head for a land-based squadron flying alongside the Air Force. He flew combat in Operation Desert Fox and Operation Southern Watch from Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.
The assignment he didn't want gave him a mission he came to respect.
He'd find out that wasn't the last time.
In 2007, the Navy took him out of the cockpit entirely.
At the height of the surge, it sent Anderson to Iraq. Not to fly. To find roadside bombs before they found soldiers.
As an individual augmentee, the Army pulled Anderson from naval aviation and dropped him into the counter-insurgency fight. He served as an electronic warfare officer with an Army combat engineer brigade. The mission was route clearance: finding and destroying the improvised explosive devices that were killing American troops.
After 22 years as a naval flight officer, he was on the ground, learning the Army's war from scratch.
"At first this didn't sit well with me," Anderson said. "Not in the least bit."
So he leaned into it. He volunteered for the hardest job on offer, joining the teams that went looking for the bombs instead of driving around them.
It changed him.
As a younger man, he'd been drawn to combat. The hunt. The kill. The win. Iraq showed him something the cockpit never had.
"Saving soldiers' lives," Anderson said, "gave me a sense of satisfaction that only maturity let me process and understand."
He'd chased the win his whole life. In Iraq, winning meant getting soldiers home.
Anderson came home from Iraq, but he didn't come back the same.
He returned to flight test, the work he loved most, serving as executive officer at Air Test and Evaluation Squadron (VX) 9, and later (VX) 31. At China Lake, those squadrons test new systems before the fleet depends on them. Anderson flew evaluations on the F/A-18F Super Hornet and EA-18G Growler, the electronic attack jet that replaced the Prowler he'd once been reassigned to.
He'd flown fighters. He'd jammed radar. He'd hunted bombs on the ground.
Now he watched the engineers.
They were brilliant. They built systems that could look perfect in the lab. But many had never lived in the world those systems flew into. They didn't know what the cockpit did to a mind when everything went wrong at once.
The best engineers learned it on their own. The rest needed someone to show them.
In 2014, someone finally asked him to show the engineers.
Anderson had retired two years earlier, a commander after 26 years, electing to stay at China Lake as a civilian.
Then his boss gave him the assignment: build a course in the operational arts. That was the whole requirement.
Anderson had built training before. Nothing like this.
The course came from one question: what did he wish the engineers had known when he was the one in the cockpit, depending on what they made?
He called it the Tactical Engineer Development Program. The first class ran in 2015. Eleven engineers. Ten years later, more than 300 have come through it.
He teaches them tactics, threats and the language of the warfighter. He teaches them something harder, too.
When the path breaks, find out where the new road goes. In Latin, the Stoics called it "amor fati," translated: love your fate. What is in the way, becomes the way.
Some lessons don't survive a PowerPoint slide.
In 1993, Anderson told a reporter that going from 0 to 150 miles per hour in 1.7 seconds off a carrier catapult was "a pretty religious experience." Now he puts engineers in a simulator and pushes them until they feel the cockpit closing in.
"I have the mental capacity of a terrified five-year-old," Anderson said, describing what combat stress can do to aircrew. "If your thing doesn't work when I have the mental capacity of a terrified five-year-old, it is worthless to the customer."
The first time a pilot ever noticed him, Anderson was in sixth grade.
He was in the front yard again when a flight of A-4 Skyhawks turned hard toward the runway. One came in low, straight at him. He waved. The pilot rocked his wings and waved back. The boy jumped up and down.
He never forgot it.
Years later, Anderson was in the landing pattern at Miramar in an F-14D when he looked down and saw a father and son pulled over on the road below. He gave the boy an exaggerated wave. He watched the boy jump up and down, waving back.
"In that moment," Anderson said, "I felt like I had paid forward what that A-4 pilot did for me 20 years earlier."