Prince Gustaf Adolf

Prince Gustaf Adolf was heir to the Swedish throne and was killed in an air crash at Copenhagen when his son was nine months old. He was the eldest son of the future Gustaf VI Adolf and Princess Margaret of Connaught, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and was created Duke of Vasterbotten. He was an army officer, a serious horseman who rode for Sweden, and chairman of the Swedish sports federation and the scouts - the visible, dutiful public work that falls to an heir's heir. He married Princess Sibylla of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1932, a match that later attracted attention because her father was an enthusiastic Nazi, and they had four daughters and then a son. On 26 January 1947 he was returning from a hunting trip in the Netherlands and boarded a KLM Douglas DC-3 at Copenhagen. The aircraft climbed to about fifty metres, stalled and crashed, killing everyone aboard - twenty-two people, including the American singer Grace Moore. The investigation found that a gust lock had been left engaged, jamming the controls. His son Carl Gustaf, born in April 1946, became heir apparent at nine months and king in 1973 on his grandfather's death, having never known his father. The accident is the reason the Swedish succession skipped a generation. His widow Sibylla never remarried and died in 1972, a year before her son came to the throne. Sweden had not lost an heir in an accident since the eighteenth century. The gust lock finding led to changes in pre-flight procedure across civil aviation. He was forty when he died.

• Lived: 1906 CE – 1947 CE
• Nationality: Swedish
• Roles: royalty