More worlds yet to conquer

At 50, the man who has masterminded the air and ground logistics for some of the planet's biggest rock tours, films and disaster missions, has his sights set on returning home in five years' time.

But in the meantime, as well as writing the screenplay for a movie based on his life, Anderson is carving for himself a new role catering for the world's fastest-growing elite club: millionaire VVIPs at leisure.

In January, Anderson was headhunted by the new chief executive of Club328, an executive jet hirer in Southampton, as sales and marketing director, to drive its reinvention. Now Club328, which already owns two exclusive yachts in Cannes harbour, is moving smartly out of business charter and into the creation of the UK market's first "lifestyle experience" package trips.

Clients will travel in small groups by private jet with a golf professional or wine expert in tow, to brief them fully on their VVIP visit to a Scottish golf course or French vineyard.

Anderson plans to include in his millionaires' itinerary a stop at a scenic west coast golf course. "You arrive at the course and instead of paying £300 you have to put £5 in an honesty box, which is in itself charming."

He says: "We are concentrating on the regions of the UK and the Mediterranean to base our jets, the next launch will be in Palma, Majorca, so we can cover the south of France - the Mediterranean is very much the millionaire and billionaire playground just now." Other targets are the private wealth hotspots of Newquay in Cornwall ("a 55-minute jet from London") and Moscow ("Russians are very flamboyant in the way they wish to spend their cash").

Club328 will be exclusive. "We are talking boats that will charter for e75,000 (£50,000) a day," says the low-key, quietly-dressed Anderson. "There are a lot of people who really enjoy the attention to detail."

Cleverly he is partnering with niche hotel and leisure groups and with "Billionaire 500" lifestyle magazine, in a strategy to find those most discerning of well-heeled clients without direct advertising.

Last week, Anderson landed a jet in Edinburgh to attack his first choice target market: Scotland. "When a client comes to Scotland he can be met by helicopter or limousine and get to locations that aren't the norm - I am not talking Gleneagles Hotel, but the bespoke castles and hideaways that some of these people are looking for."

Anderson's next aim is to take Club328 transatlantic, offering lifestyle packages to the US and Middle East markets. "We could take a party of eight people out of LA and have them teeing off within 13 hours at a place like Skibo."

He observes: "Jets come and go and nobody has actually committed to putting a jet into Scotland until this week. That doesn't necessarily mean that it is the Edinburgh market I am trying to attract Aberdeen has the oil and gas, a new golf course. Inverness is the fourth-busiest private jet airport in the UK."

When the jet flew on to Inverness, it was a special landing for a man who has lived out of a suitcase, been to 70 places in Africa, made 60 trips to Hong Kong and nine to New Zealand. "I hadn't been back since I left to join the air force, it was emotional."

The young Anderson spent five years in the RAF, then began his immersion in special aviation projects, joining a Californian company which ran support programmes around the globe.

"It took me to places like Angola, Libya, Chad, Papua New Guinea, a lot of the projects were humanitarian, some were oil exploration. In Angola, we supported De Beers' mining, that gave me a very interesting grounding in specialised logistics. Through that came as a completely unexpected introduction into the music world."

Rock legend Phil Collins was already a neighbour who had become a close friend - Anderson was one of the select 50 guests at Collins's famous 50th birthday bash - and the Genesis singer installed the Scot as his tour pilot.

"From there everything else just snowballed. It took me into tours including the Rolling Stones, Madonna and the Los Angeles Philharmonic three private shows for the Sultan of Brunei music was (already) my absolute passion, and I went from that to being responsible for some of the biggest tours around the world."

Anderson controlled every movement of the stars' entourage "from when they leave the stage at night to when they go back on stage the following day in a different country, all the logistics, moving the equipment, chartering the aircraft, co-ordinating up to 40 road trucks everything is time-sensitive yes it is very stressful".

His music career culminated, he says, with the invitation to join the U2 "Popmart" world tour - the industry's biggest yet. "We started in Las Vegas and finished in Capetown; it was checking the hotel room drawers to find out what country you were in."

Then it was on to Hollywood, where his credits include Beyond Borders, Racing Stripes, the Bourne Supremacy and Munich, supporting Steven Spielberg on his last project. "Everything has to be based on a what if' scenario - what can you put in place to make sure you don't lose $550,000 (£285,000) a day in downtime waiting for equipment."

His biggest challenge was in filming Troy, where the location was switched from Malta to Mexico due to a terrorist threat. "One weekend we used six aircraft and moved 300 tonnes of equipment and 190 studio personnel We partially closed Malta airport, it was like the Berlin airlift."

Anderson, who has a 14-week-old baby daughter and two other children aged nine and three, admits to home being the "Samsonite Hilton", and says: "I haven't had a lot of downtime. I have a family that has suffered. But it's the buzz of working within a very precise network around the world, where you are dealing with like-minded individuals who understand logistics."

Along the way he has worked with Formula One, the Athens Olympics, and the NBC network's coverage of the Indonesian tsunami disaster. "I was given 12 hours' notice to jump on an airplane to Singapore, and by the time they arrived from New York all the aircraft were in place for them to do their live broadcasts - the NBC audience went up from 12 million to 15 million a night."

Disasters are familiar. Anderson spent almost a year in Ethiopia working on behalf of the US government and also spent time in Rwanda. He recalls: "There have been some life-changing things, which helps you to appreciate the finer things in life when you see what people have to go through."

But now it is the finest things in life that are on offer from Club328, and when the product is right, Anderson plans to introduce it to some of his celebrity contacts. "I have made a huge number of friends in the entertainment business, working with some of the leading men and leading ladies who are not the animals the media likes to paint them as - very often it is the people they surround themselves with who may be."

Hollywood has rubbed off in more ways than one. Wherever he travels, Anderson is now poring over the screenplay for a movie (Highland boy comes home, working title Where the Salmon Leap) to be shot in Hong Kong and Scotland, backed in the US, and made by his own production company. He also has support, from the likes of actor/director Martin Sheen, to launch a screenwriting academy. "I am trying to help people develop their storyline that ordinarily wouldn't get the time of day in the likes of Hollywood."

But for the man who has made the time of day an exacting science, it could be a storybook ending before he comes home to Scotland.