The aviation entrepreneur and founder of the Dornier Foundation for Aerospace Silvius Dornier is dead. He was 95 years old and died on June 19, 2022 in Munich surrounded by his family. He leaves behind seven children and 17 grandchildren.

Together with his father and his siblings, he rebuilt the Dornier works after the Second World War, making Dornier once again a world-renowned company. In 1985 Daimler-Benz took over the majority of the share capital of the Dornier Group. Silvius Dornier dedicated his life to the development of high technologies: the pursuit of innovations beyond aviation and his work as a socially committed family entrepreneur in Germany distinguished him. 

Silvius Julius Dornier was born on April 12, 1927 in Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance, the son of the aircraft designer Claude Dornier and his wife Anna. He attended schools in Friedrichshafen and, after the outbreak of the Second World War, he also attended high school in Kempten in the Allgäu for a year. When he returned to Friedrichshafen, he was drafted into one of the local heavy anti-aircraft batteries with 1943 and 8,8 cm guns as an air force helper while he was still attending school in 10,5. There he and his comrades experienced several heavy air raids on his hometown. 

In the early autumn of 1944, he was called up for compulsory Reich Labor Service in Hüfingen in the Black Forest. In order not to be drafted into the SS, Silvius Dornier volunteered as an officer candidate for the Luftwaffe. Most of his comrades fell in battle, which moved him greatly throughout his life. Silvius Dornier was deployed east of Berlin towards the end of the war. At the end of the war, Silvius Dornier was taken prisoner of war by the Americans on the Elbe, but was transferred by US units to a large British prisoner of war camp on the Baltic Sea in Schleswig-Holstein.

After his release from captivity in autumn 1945, an old farmhouse in Vorarlberg, which his father had owned since 1932, offered him a temporary home. However, his health had been so badly affected by an injury in the war and by the circumstances in captivity that medical treatment and operations were repeatedly required for years. 

After completing a technical degree at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in 1954 as a Dipl. Ing. ETH, Silvius Dornier worked briefly at ETH Zurich as an assistant at the Institute for Aerodynamics under Professor Jakob Ackeret until his father Claude Dornier helped him with the reconstruction of aircraft construction proposed.

In January 1955, Silvius Dornier moved from Switzerland to Friedrichshafen, where he was followed by his wife Esther after his marriage in September of the same year. Also in 1955, his father, who wanted his factory to continue as a family business, formally made him and his older brothers co-partners in Dornier Werke GmbH. In 1956 he was appointed managing director alongside his older brothers.

Modern technological special tasks outside of classic aircraft construction that had previously been processed within the framework of the Dornier works were made independent at the suggestion of Silvius Dornier. Silvius Dornier was commissioned by his father as a representative of the shareholders' meeting and as one of its managing directors with the further development of the new technologically and systems-oriented company. In 1962, this resulted in the subsidiary Dornier System GmbH, a company that turned Dornier into a high-tech company. With the areas of aerospace, medical technology, environmental technology, electrical engineering and numerous other technologies. He later passed this task on to his younger brother Donatus Dornier. 

After the death of company founder Claude Dornier in December 1969, family tensions arose among the shareholders. After the partial division of the business shares that followed and after his brother Donatus died in a traffic accident, Silvius Dornier left the management at Dornier in 1971. 

Later, in 1977, the year when his wife Esther died in an accident in the Tyrolean Alps, he again temporarily took on special tasks as managing director of Dornier System GmbH for a few years. This step gave him new stability after this personal blow of fate.

In 1985, several large companies tried to take over the Dornier Group. Finally, an agreement was reached whereby Daimler-Benz took over the majority of the share capital of the Dornier company and part of the family withdrew as shareholders. 

However, Silvius Dornier initially remained a shareholder together with his eldest brother Claudius, who had previously been spokesman for the management. In 1989 he founded the Silvius Dornier Verwaltungsgesellschaft in Munich, called SDV - his own single family office - in order to achieve his own entrepreneurial goals. In 1995, Silvius Dornier finally parted with his remaining Dornier shares, which he also sold to Daimler-Benz.

After German reunification, Silvius Dornier took over two former state-owned farms in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on the Baltic Sea from Treuhand AG and developed them on the basis of organic farming into a recognized model farm, Hofgut Brook. A former mansion of the former landowners in the immediate vicinity was acquired in 1999 and developed into the modern hotel complex Schlossgut Gross Schwansee.

Out of social responsibility and an interest in education and young people, Silvius Dornier founded the Esther and Silvius Dornier Foundation in 1996 to support gifted students and award scholarships.

Interest in agriculture and forestry prompted Silvius Dornier to acquire the larger forestry company Adelegg in the Allgäu in 2003, and later, together with two other partners, also to acquire land in Romania, the management of which is overseen by the Silvius Dornier Verwaltungsgesellschaft. From the commitment in the field of agriculture and forestry in combination with financial portfolio management, Do-Investment AG finally emerged as a company that offers comprehensive, individual asset management for private customers.

In 2005, Silvius Dornier founded the Dornier Foundation for Aerospace, which then set up the Dornier Museum in Friedrichshafen, which reports on the work and history of Dornier aircraft construction in a historical context. 

In the Dornier Museum, the engineer and entrepreneur has manifested the eventful history of the family company. Since his death, the Dornier Museum has also represented the personal history of Silvius Dornier.