French billionaire MP Olivier Dassault killed in helicopter crash
PARIS — French billionaire Olivier Dassault, a politician and scion of the Dassault aircraft-making family, was killed in a helicopter crash on Sunday.
Dassault, 69 and a father-of-three, died around 6 pm (1700
GMT) when his helicopter crashed near the upmarket coastal resort of Deauville
in northwest France, parliamentary and investigation sources told AFP.
French President Emmanuel Macron led tributes, saying in a
tweet that “Olivier Dassault loved France. Captain of industry, local MP,
reserve commander in the air force; throughout his life he never stopped
serving our country”.
Macron called his death “a great loss” and sent his
condolences to the Dassault family, one of the most influential in France with
interests spanning aeronautics, defense, auctioneering, wine and the media.
The Dassault Aviation group has been a leading French plane
manufacturer for the last 70 years and is behind the Falcon private jet, the
Mirage warplane, and most recently the state-of-the-art Rafale fighter.
Forbes magazine estimated that Olivier Dassault was the
361st most wealthy person on the planet in 2020, with a fortune estimated at
around five billion euros ($6 billion) — around the same as his three siblings.
Famed family
Olivier was the grandson of Marcel Bloch, a famed Jewish
aeronautical engineer who changed his name to “Dassault” which means “on the
attack” in French and converted to Roman Catholicism.
After helping to develop an innovative propeller used on
French aircraft in World War I, Marcel was imprisoned during World War II and
deported to the Nazi Buchenwald death
camp after refusing to collaborate with Germany’s aviation industry.
Control of Dassault Aviation passed to Olivier’s father
Serge, but he had not named an heir to succeed him when he died in 2018 after
suffering heart failure at his Paris office.
Olivier once declared himself “the most qualified” of
Serge’s four children, earning a stern public rebuke from his father.
He appeared to be on track to take the reins but shortly
before his father’s death he resigned as chairman of the group’s supervisory
board because he said the role was incompatible with his parliamentary duties.
Many of Dassault’s colleagues on the political right paid
tribute to a man who was also a passionate photographer, a pilot, and a
composer of music.
As well as a majority stake in the family’s aviation group,
the Dassaults own their own vineyard in Bordeaux and the influential right-wing
newspaper Le Figaro.
Involuntary manslaughter inquiry
France’s national air crash investigation agency, the BEA,
said in a tweet that the crash had occurred shortly after take-off from
“private grounds.”
The weather in Deauville was sunny with low wind on Sunday.
Sources close to the inquiry indicated that the pilot of the
helicopter was also killed and that no-one else was on board.
An involuntary manslaughter investigation was opened by
prosecutors.
The civil aviation Bureau of Investigations and Analysis
said in a tweet that the helicopter, an Aerospatiale AS350 Ecureuil (Squirrel),
had crashed “on take-off.”
A search area around the crash site was sealed off and the
air transport place put in charge of the inquiry.
French Prime Minister Jean Castex hailed Dassault as “a
humanist MP, a visionary entrepreneur, a man deeply committed to his country.”
Richard Ferrand, president of the National Assembly, the
lower house of parliament in which Dassault served as a representative for the
Oise area of northern France, said he was thinking of Dassault’s family and
friends “who must feel terrible pain.”
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