French billionaire MP Olivier Dassault killed in helicopter crash

French billionaire and member of Parliament Olivier Dassault died on Sunday in a helicopter crash.

Citing French local media, DW News Agency reported that the 69-year-old, a lawmaker with the center-right Republicans party, was killed in Calavdos in Normandy, northern France.

On Friday, he was seen in a public engagement in Beauvais near Paris with Prime Minister Jean Castex and Interior Minister Gerard Darmanin.

French President Emmanuel Macron took to Twitter to pay his tributes stating that Dassault "never ceased to serve our country, to value its assets. His sudden death is a great loss."

Dassault, was the eldest son of billionaire industrialist Serge Dassault, whose group builds the Rafale warplanes and owns Le Figaro newspaper.

Since 2002 he was the lawmaker for the conservative Les Republicains party and along with his two brothers and sister was heir to the family fortune.

His grandfather Marcel, an aeronautical engineer and celebrated inventor developed a propeller used in French planes during World War I, which went on to become a business empire .