Monaco: Helicopter views and cutting through smoke

opinion

by Rob Hodgetts

29 September 2026

Airbus Corporate Helicopters' ACH160 at the Monaco Yacht Show.

The test pilot rocks the helicopter onto its side and dives steeply, treating his passengers to a face full of Monaco mountainside.

Eyes widen and stomachs remain somewhere higher up, but quickly the ACH160 recovers its poise and levels out. It’s not a typical manoeuvre of a business helicopter but a brief demonstration of its next-generation recovery mode. A double click of a magic button on the control stick instructs the aircraft to take over and recover stable flight. The Airbus Corporate Helicopters’ flagship can essentially fly itself. It’s to reduce pilot workload, thus improving safety. Insides reunited and grins enlarged, we fly on, the ice hockey stick-shaped blades cutting quietly through the sparkling sky.

Up here, the air is clear as we glide past the hilltop village of Sainte Agnes. The views stretch west into Italy and east back along the Riviera. We cruise back at 150 knots out over the superyachts at anchor outside Port Hercule and the microcosm of the Monaco Yacht Show.

The flight offers the kind of perspective the new CEO of Ferretti Group, Stassi Anastassov was talking about at the Marine Money Forum at the start of the week.

He likened yachting to the old days when smoking in offices was de rigeur. If you popped out and then came back, you’d be hit with the fug.

“That’s a bit how I feel getting into the industry. There is a lot of smoke,” said the former boss of Duracell and senior exec at Procter & Gamble.

“There is a lack of systems, a lack of clarity. It’s an industry built on passion. There is a benefit to that, but there is a lack of perspective.” His goal, he said, was to bring an “air purifier to fix that conference room”.

One of the key issues to solve is the perceived difficulty of being a yacht owner, he explained.

“Only a boat is worse than having a stable of 10 horses,” he said. “We need to find ways to make the ownership of yachts much simpler. I don’t want to accept complexity as normal.”

Laurens Last, who bought Heesen Yachts after a successful career in packaging, suggests owners can often struggle to sift through an overload of subjective information.

“Because it’s such a glamorous industry, everybody is saying something and owners are getting confused,” he told us, speaking at his beachfront property in Roquebrune St Martin, dubbed the House of Heesen for the week.

“We need to try to make it objective. In other industries it’s really about facts and figures.”

Winning together

Tapping into spiralling wealth levels in the world should be another area of focus for yachting, says Anastassov. According to Knight Frank’s Wealth Report, the number of people worth more than $30m has risen by almost 30% in five years. UBS recorded an 8.8% increase in the global billionaire population in 2025.

But his vision, he explained to the Ferretti board, was that rather than trample the opposition in the quest for new business, he wanted the whole industry to benefit.

“I said, no, no. We’re missing this whole thing. I want everybody to win,” he said. “We should all grow together and we should all be able to win together. I just want to go a bit bigger than anybody else.”

He added: “The growth of billionaires is way, way ahead of the growth of our industry. We need to rejuvenate the population of owners. If you have that as a starting point, then the rest becomes easy.”

READ: Owner Vonk: ‘I don’t want to be half pregnant’

While every company will have its own pipeline strategy, Last suggested one way of removing the friction and attracting new entrants to the industry was fractional as a halfway house between charter and ownership.

“The problem with yachting is that if you buy a yacht, you kind of buy a company, and it’s a loss-making company, it’s an annoying company,” he said. “If you’re a billionaire, you own a lot of assets, and you try to keep your life as simple as possible.

“I have a NetJets account and I’m very happy. I have no hassle. I know we’ve tried to do that in yachting, but I think that’s going to be the future.”

It was a thought echoed by Richard Hadida, owner of Oyster Yachts, who told us how a share of the late F1 team principal Eddie Jordan’s Oyster 885 was his gateway to ownership.

“I did a deal with Eddie where I would pay him for 20 days a year,” Hadida said. “They stored my stuff, I knew the captain and the crew and when I got onboard it felt like home. Then I took 40 and then 60 days a year.

“It worked really well and that cemented our friendship. Then I ended up buying the boat from him and he took days from me.”

Monaco’s Port Hercule is the centre of the universe in late September. Photo: Monaco Yacht Show.

To leverage new markets, and in parallel with the facts and figures argument, brands must continue to develop a strong emotional narrative, says Anastassov. He says when he was appointed CEO of Ferretti Group, which owns seven brands including luxury Italian boatbuilder Riva, he was finally able to impress his mother-in-law.

“When she heard that I was in charge of Riva, she said, ‘Well, finally, he cannot be that bad,’” he laughed.

Oyster CEO Stefan Zimmermann Zschocke called it “making that story alive”, while Hadida says word of mouth is “very, very strong”.

But Last warned: “Branding needs to be authentic. Your product needs to represent what you stand for, or people will not buy it.”

Speaking on the roof of the Monaco Yacht Club, Airbus Corporate Helicopters’ new CEO Nicolas Boltoukhine spoke of the importance of partnerships across industries to penetrate new markets. ACH has produced models in association with Aston Martin and Mercedes-Benz, for example. Some 15% of the company’s sales are for use on superyachts, hence its presence in Monaco (alongside an educational piece on operational safety) and partnership with Edmiston.

“They know how to build boats, we know everything about helicopters,” he tells us. “And for customers, they are facing the same team, the same family.”

He added: “When you want to buy a Porsche or a Mercedes-Benz, you know where to find them. And this is what we have in mind for the coming years, to provide a good customer experience. Then after, they chat together. The story we are living, it’s not about marketing, it’s about sharing experience.”

‘Playing chess with superyachts’

With a head full of blue-sky thinking, the gaze settles back to the coalface and an industry busy doing business at the Monaco Yacht Show.

Down there, amid the throngs pacing the pontoons, where progress is measured in hellos and handshakes. The more the merrier for your ego, the fewer the better if you want to get anywhere. Greetings range from a nod and a grin, to light bantz, to the full-on “meaningful connections” beloved of LinkedIn-speak.

But you scurry on past the prospects and the wannabes and the unspecified sockless and the hungry brokers with the on-demand smiles and thousand yard stares – amplified, presumably, by the warning presence of Nixie, the yacht at the centre of the Cecil Wright vs Storonsky commission case – and the circling lawyers and the exhibitors and the yacht managers and the youthful crew and the bankers and the insurers and the corporate service providers and the fintechs and the flag states and the class societies and surveyors and the recruiters and the journos and the content creators (also sockless) and all the other essential parts of the ecosystem, trying to get on and to make that meeting which you’ve just discovered is the other side of the port and the swing bridge is out. And your feet hurt. And everywhere white shirts hurrying, like waves across the sea. But at 5 o’clock the drinks come out and the industry breathes a collective sigh of relief.

Heesen owner Laurens Last with Project Ananda.

The topic of AI crops up often. And each conversation takes a different tangent, like chatting with GPT himself. The threats begin at non-malicious software updates causing engine havoc and teenage hackers switching the lights and music on and off all the way through to extortion and the machines “playing chess with superyachts at sea, just for fun”, according to Elvio Romano of V.Risk, speaking on a panel at Marine Money. The pros include efficiencies in manufacturing, research, contract writing, even prospecting tools with alerts for UHNWIs who’ve sold their business and might have a bit of spare cash to splash on a yacht.

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Heesen’s Last chuckles at the thought that, with a little help from Claude and his friends, he has become something of a naval architect. “AI is helping owners to investigate what they’re buying,” he added. “Owners are very smart. The industry needs to adapt to that new reality.”

The ACH160 is so smart another click of a magic button on the collective will instruct the aircraft to fly a go-around and return to the exact spot to have another go. This is useful for aborted landings in bad weather, for example.

It’s the Airbus Corporate Helicopters’ equivalent of opening Outlook and punching in the date of next year’s Monaco Yacht Show. Your digital calendar will then bring you back same time, same place to do it all again. Hoping by then the fug will have disappeared.