38 | Flight International | 5-11 June 2018 flightglobal.com
OBITUARY
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A determined leader
Industrialist maintained ownership of family business despite pressure to consolidate,
ensuring it became France’s only independent aircraft manufacturer after creation of Airbuspolitical hostage to Buchenwald; Serge was detained in
the Drancy concentration camp for several months. After
the war, Serge resumed his engineering studies while
Marcel rebuilt the Bloch company and changed the fam-
ily name to Dassault, from the resistance nom-de-guerre
of his brother Paul: Char d’assault, or “assault tank”.
The company delivered a series of ground-breaking jet
fighters starting in the 1950s, from the Ourangan to the
Mystere and the Mirage. By the early 1960s, Marcel
Dassault was ready to expand the business beyond
combat aircraft. He dispatched Serge, then 37, to the
USA. This was the era of the Lockheed JetStar, North
American Sabreliner and Lear 23, and Marcel wanted
to find a way to enter the market. Serge returned and
launched the Mystere-Falcon 20, quickly impressing a
Pan Am sales consultant named Lindbergh. Over the
next five decades, more than 20 different Falcon mod-
els would follow, establishing Dassault as a leader in
the business jet world.
At the same time, Serge Dassault re-committed the
company to the combat aircraft business. Rather than
follow the European consolidation trend in the defence
market, he followed his father’s lead in demanding a
French-built alternative to fighters built by American
and multi-national firms. The powerful, elegant Rafale is
the result.
Introduced a year after Serge’s retirement from Das-
sault Aviation in 2000, the Rafale finally found success
on the export market 14 years later, with a firm order
signed by Egypt. This was followed two years later by a
contract from Qatar, with India also to fly the type.
In his continued role as Groupe Dassault chairman,
Serge Dassault represented the last active link among
the leaders of the aerospace industry to that first cohort
of trained aeronautical engineers and industrialists
who came of age in the First World War. They were, as
a rule, a fiercely independent lot, and ready to gamble
their company’s future on a single, risky idea.
Serge Dassault’s life and career should make them all- including his father – proud. ■
Dassault re-committed company to combat aircraftDassault AviationSerge Dassault, 4 April 1925 – 28 May 2018S
erge Dassault died at his desk in his Paris office on 28
May at the age of 93 after a long life that ended with
him in control – exactly as he wished.
The heir to Marcel Dassault’s industrial empire,
which spanned aviation, journalism, viticulture and
software, he had fought to uphold the independence of
his family business against all comers. For the most part,
he won.
Upon his death, the family retained more than three-
fifths of Groupe Dassault’s shares, with about one-quar-
ter in free float and one-tenth held by Airbus. On the
company’s organisation chart, Serge Dassault was sur-
rounded by close family members in top positions.
It is an ownership and management structure that
must have seemed highly unlikely when Serge took con-
trol of the aircraft business in 1986 at the age of 61, just
months after the death of his father and the retirement of
then-Dassault president B C Vallieres.
The pressure to consolidate France’s two largest aircraft
manufacturers – Dassault and Aérospatiale – never
seemed far off, but tightened severely in the mid-1990s. In
the end, Aérospatiale merged with Germany’s DASA and
Spain’s CASA in 2001 to form Airbus, leaving Dassault as
France’s remaining independent aircraft manufacturer.
Such a result, no doubt, would have made Serge’s fa-
ther smile. Marcel Dassault, born Marcel Bloch, gradu-
ated from France’s first school dedicated to aeronautical
engineering in 1913. He was part of the first generation
of specifically trained engineers to enter the aircraft de-
sign field. In 1916, he sold the Éclair propeller to the
French military.
Two years after the birth of Serge Bloch on 4 April
1925, Charles Lindbergh landed the Spirit of St Louis in
Paris. Shortly later, Marcel Dassault returned to aviation
after delving into cars and other industries following the
First World War. The French government nationalised the
Bloch Aircraft Company in 1936 – the first and last time
the family would lose control of its own company.
As Jews, father and son felt the wrath of Nazi occupa-
tion. Marcel refused to turn his aircraft design skills to
the service of the Nazi regime and was transported as aSerge Dassault took over empire from father MarcelDassault Aviation