The helicopter always left the ship first. Burrows finally followed it.

The helicopter always left first.

Before the first jet launched, it lifted off the carrier and settled into a circle, three or four miles out, low over the water. It stayed up through the whole launch, ready if someone went into the ocean. It landed after the last jet came back aboard.

Hours of flying the same loop over the same water.

Down on the flight deck, a young jet mechanic from Colorado watched it go. Every time.

More than four decades later, Bob Burrows, project lead in the Signals Collection and Exploitation Branch at Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division, still carries the thought.

"They might be flying a circle out there, but they're not on the ship," Burrows said. "Even if it's for two, three, four hours, flying that stupid circle, they're not on the ship."

The thought outlasted his first enlistment.

Today, Burrows leads the NAWCWD team behind a signals intelligence sensor that rides on small unmanned aircraft. When the gear breaks or needs an upgrade, his team gets on a plane: Afghanistan, destroyers underway, Japan, Greece.

"We build, we integrate and provide support for the end users," Burrows said.

He builds for the end users because he spent 20 plus years as one.

Burrows joined the Navy in 1981, got out after his first contract and came back in 1989 to fly. The next 18 years put him in the back of Navy helicopters for more than 4,500 flight hours, the equivalent of six months in the air without ever landing. He finished as a chief petty officer.

He's been chasing the world since the day he signed up. The reason starts in a living room in Colorado.

Burrows grew up in Durango, Colorado, a mountain town with a river through it and a ski area 20 minutes up the road. His father, Leon, ran the town's parks and recreation department and served in World War II with the 10th Mountain Division.

Leon's twin brother was killed in Italy at 18, less than two weeks before the war there ended. Leon was wounded the same day.

But the house talked.

His parents had worked for the State Department in North Africa. His father took a job in Korea for a couple of years. His siblings and parents told stories of traveling the world, and the souvenirs filled the living room: brass ashtrays from Korea, rugs from North Africa, pieces of Italy.

"I was mesmerized," Burrows said. "I never really left Durango."

So he joined right out of high school. The Navy's recruiting slogan at the time made him a simple offer: Navy. It's not just a job, it's an adventure.

"I wanted to see the world," he said.

The Navy sent him to Naval Air Station Lemoore, California, to fix jets. He dreamed of F-14s and got the A-7 Corsair II instead. He hated it on sight.

"But I came to love that aircraft," he said. "It was a homely little aircraft that got the job done."

He deployed twice during the Cold War aboard aircraft carriers USS Coral Sea (CV 43) and USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70), working the flight deck with teenagers in stretches that sometimes ran two days straight.

Nothing matched that teamwork. But that still wasn't enough to keep him in.

He went home to Durango and Fort Lewis College to chase a teaching degree like his father's. Three years in, working three jobs, the plan ran into junior high physical education.

"I'm not meant to be a teacher," Burrows said.

He missed the Navy more than he expected. So he sat down with the recruiter in his hometown. The recruiter asked what he wanted to do.

"Well, I want to fly."

He volunteered for aircrew school.

The Navy offered him an open job at a base he'd never heard of: Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake.

Driving up U.S. Highway 395 toward a town with one traffic light, he wondered what he'd gotten himself into. The feeling lasted four minutes.

"Everybody was cool," he said. "I sat down, looked around at the mountains and thought, 'All right, this isn't going to be too bad.'"

For three years, he flew search and rescue in Hueys and supported the testers on the ranges, hauling Navy test parachutists to 10,000 feet.

"They strapped missile seekers to the aircraft, and we'd go pretend we were a missile," he said. "Not a lot of missiles do 120 knots."

Then came the H-46 Sea Knight and Helicopter Combat Support Squadron 5 in Guam. The job: replenishment-at-sea runs between ships, 10 to 12 hours at a stretch, lying on the deck hooking cargo loads through the belly of the helicopter about once every 90 seconds.

Between Guam tours, the Navy ordered him to San Diego to teach at Helicopter Combat Support Squadron 3. Burrows begged the detailer not to send him. The detailer sent him. Three years later, Burrows was flying in the fleet beside the men he'd trained.

During that San Diego tour, Burrows hit a rough stretch in his life. His chief noticed.

"No, no, I'm not going on leave," Burrows said.

"No, no, you don't understand," the chief said. "You are going on leave."

That afternoon, he packed a bag, put his German shepherd, Tonka, in the truck and drove up Interstate 15 to see where it went.

Idaho.

A woman at a Twin Falls restaurant pointed him east toward the mountains, and two hours later, he rolled into Driggs, staring at the back side of the Tetons. There was a real estate office across from the stop sign. He walked in.

"How much does property go for around here?" he said. "Two hours later, I own two acres of prime real estate in Driggs, Idaho."

He held the land five years. It quadrupled in value. It sold in two days.

Back in Guam for a second tour, Burrows flew with a young crew member who had switched over from maintenance because he figured aircrew was light work. He was a bodybuilder, 5 feet 6 inches of muscle. Burrows took him on his first real carrier replenishment-at-sea, 12 hours in the heat. The man stumbled off the aircraft looking like he'd lost a fight.

"I had no idea how hard that was," he told Burrows. "I have never worked that hard in my life."

Burrows' last cruise came in 2002. After the final replenishment-at-sea run out of the Arabian Gulf, with the aircraft put to bed, he sat alone on the flight deck and watched the sun drop to the horizon. The ship hummed behind him. Everything else was quiet.

"It was a beautiful experience where everything felt right in the world," he said. "Then I went and ate dinner and ruined it."

He closed out his 26 years back at China Lake, flying Hueys with the search-and-rescue unit at Air Test and Evaluation Squadron 31.

Then the flying ended.

What came next was the part the slogan never covered. He chased flying jobs with contractors and looked at Antarctica. Nothing landed. His pension didn't show up either. One month. Two. Three.

Then a Defense Finance and Accounting Service supervisor picked up. He was a retired chief, too.

"Hey, Chief," he told Burrows.

Three hours later, the back pay was on its way.

"The Chief Mafia kind of came through," Burrows said.

The job took longer. Seven months in, a friend, a retired senior chief bomb disposal technician, called with an offer: Come to China Lake, work with us. Burrows told him he didn't know anything about that stuff.

"Nah, you'll be fine," the friend said. "We'll teach you everything you need to know."

In 2007, Burrows joined the China Lake Propulsion Laboratories as a firing officer, running live-fire tests on fuzes, the components that make a weapon function when the warfighter needs it to.

In 2014, he moved to the sensor work. A few years later, he took over the team.

"I have the best set of engineers on this base working for me," he said.

The team came from everywhere around the world. All of them, he said, were "very single-minded on getting this system up and running and out to the fleet."

When the program office asked whether his group could build a new sensor, his engineers came back with a thousand reasons it couldn't be done. And a shorter list of reasons it could.

"We only focused on the 14 reasons why we can do it," Burrows said.

The work still hands him the world. One trip put him on Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean he'd never once imagined he'd see.

"It was beyond words how beautiful it was," he said.

At China Lake, the search-and-rescue helicopter still flies.

"When I see it fly over, I still feel like, yeah, that's a mission I could still be doing," he said.

He got everything the slogan promised. And more.

"I don't want to sit on the porch and think about what-ifs," Burrows said.