There's a New Most-Tracked Flight in History

5M people followed queen's journey home to London, per Flightradar24
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 14, 2022 8:17 AM CDT
Queen's Final Flight Is Most-Tracked in History
People gather along for the procession of the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Hall, in London, on Wednesday.   (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

The plane carrying the body of Queen Elizabeth II to her home in London just became the most-tracked flight ever—by a long shot. Five million people tracked the Royal Air Force plane as it flew from Edinburgh, Scotland—about 100 miles south of where the queen died at Balmoral Castle—to London on Tuesday, according to flight tracker website Flightradar24. In the 1 hour and 12 minutes the Boeing C17A Globemaster was in the air, 4.79 million people followed along on Flightradar24's website or app and another 296,000 watched on a YouTube livestream, the site said, per CNN. The previous record came only last month when 2.9 million people tracked some portion of the flight that carried House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taipei, Taiwan, according to the site.

This record is unlikely to be broken "for a long while," said Ian Petchenik, Flightradar24's director of communications. "Within the first minute of the aircraft's transponder activating, 6 million people attempted to click on the flight carrying the Queen," which "put unprecedented strain on the Flightradar24 platform," he wrote in a blog post. "In total we processed 76.2 million requests related to this flight alone—that's any action by a user," including setting adjustments. The plane carrying the queen's coffin landed at Royal Air Force base Northolt before the coffin was offloaded and transported to Buckingham Palace, to "rest overnight in the Bow Room," per Reuters. On Wednesday, it will be moved to Westminster Hall, where Elizabeth will lie in state until her funeral at Westminster Abbey on Monday. (More Queen Elizabeth II stories.)

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