06/06/2026
Why Alexander Onassis Never Got His Father’s Fortune — And What Destroyed the Heir
At 4:23 in the afternoon on Monday, January 22nd, 1973, a Piaggio P.136L-2 amphibious aircraft, registration SXBDC, operated by Olympic Airways and belonging to the Onassis family, rolled down runway 33 at Athens Ellenikon International Airport for what was supposed to be a routine test flight. The plane was in the air for 15 seconds.
The right wing dropped, it stayed down, the aircraft lost control, and smashed into the tarmac before it had climbed high enough to give the three men inside any chance of survival. The cockpit crumpled. The man sitting in the left seat suffered catastrophic trauma to his skull, a brain hemorrhage so severe that the English neurosurgeon flown in from London to save him would later walk out of the operating theater, find the father waiting in the corridor, and tell him quietly that his son had no chance of surviving his injuries.
The man in the left seat was 24 years old. He was the only son of Aristotle Onassis, the richest, most feared, most mythologized Greek on Earth. He was the heir to a shipping empire worth hundreds of millions of dollars, the future of a dynasty that had remade the economics of the post-war Mediterranean, the one person on the planet for whom Aristotle Onassis had built everything.
He was dead by the next afternoon. And within 2 years, so was his father. In today's episode of Old Money Allure, we trace the life and the suspicious death of Alexander Onassis, the prince who never got to be king, the heir who was erased before he could inherit, and the 24-year-old whose 15 seconds in the air destroyed the most powerful family in the world. The son of the world....
