High Flyer

 

When Charles Muench was a kid, he built gasoline-fueled model airplanes. He'd take them outside and fly them around in big circles. "Some of them got pretty fancy," he says, "but they always crashed." That didn't stop him from wanting to go up in the air himself, although he didn't get a change until 1961, when he took his first trip in a Lockheed Electra.

He loved it. At the time, he didn't realize that flying was going to play a big part in the development of his companies. But then Don Bergert, a pilot who was Muench's sales manager at Integrated Systems, suggested they buy an airplane. "I thought he was nuts," says Muench, "a pilot gone plane crazy. But then I saw he had a good idea.

"Our customers were primarily small municipal utility companies, and they were spread out all over the Southeast. If you wanted to fly in by commercial airline, you had to rise at 4 a.m., drive to the Atlanta airport, fly somewhere like Memphis, and then drive four more hours into the Tennessee hinterlands. It was a lot of work."

Muench agreed that Integrated Systems needed a plane, so he bought a Beechcraft Bonanza and leased it to the company. His sales manager taught him to fly, and Muench was hooked. When he left Integrated Systems, he took the plane with him. "That plane helped ISC sell its first units," he says. "Terry Hughey and I would load them up and fly around to Boston and Philadelphia to see reps.When we got orders, we hand-delivered them -- that was the only way we could be sure they's arrive in good shape. It was a good opportunity for us to talk to the engineers who would be using them, and it also made us look like a class act."

The days of personal delivery lasted about a year, and then Muench had to sell his plane. "We were strapped for cash, and I knew I could get $20,000 for it. I figured that if we invested the money in the company, I could get another one soon." In October of 1978, Muench bought a new Piper Cheyenne with an 1,800-mile range. Orders are no longer delivered by hand, but the plane comes in handby for visiting potential customers and for attending sales meetings and conventions. "It sure beats the hell out of getting up at 4 a.m.," says Muench.

Flying does something for Muench's psyche, too. "It's like getting pulled out of time," he says. "You get thrust into another world. When you're flying, you're active, because you're always thinking. But you're relaxing at the same time."

As a pilot, Muench has a great ambition: He wants to fly from the United States to Australia. "I'd need a new plane for that trip -- one with a 2,500-mile range, at least," he says. "I guess that's still a ways off."

In the meantime, he's planning to fly around Australia. (He'll get there by commercial airline.) "When you fly a small plane, you stay low to the ground," he says. "You get a fairly good appreciation of how big a country is. Try flying low over the desert in our Southwest sometime. It's a vast, completely unpopulated area -- and it's right in this country. I want to do the same thing in Australia. There are lots of places there you can't go by car. There simply aren't any roads."