Quote from The Swift Programming Language, which answers your question:
“Swift’s compiler performs four helpful safety-checks to make sure
that two-phase initialization is completed without error:”Safety check 1 “A designated initializer must ensure that all of the
“properties introduced by its class are initialized before it
delegates up to a superclass initializer.”Excerpt From: Apple Inc. “The Swift Programming Language.” iBooks.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/swift-programming-language/id881256329?mt=11