RAF flight with Queen’s coffin set all-time flight tracking record

The plane, RAF, carrying the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II has broken records to become the most-tracked flight ever.

According to Flightradar24, an aviation tracker website, on September 13, about five million people followed the flight online as the deceased Queen was flown from Edinburgh to London. The number of followers was derived from two sources. 4.79 million people followed the journey of the flight on the website and mobile app, Flightradar24, and an additional 296,000 tracked the plane on YouTube.

The plane, Royal Air Force carrying the Queen, spent one hour and 12 minutes in flight. It landed at a military station named RAF Northolt, about six miles from Heathrow Airport in Greater London. The Queen’s coffin was taken to Buckingham Palace from Northolt. On September 14 the coffin was escorted to Westminster Hall in Parliament, where the queen will lie in state until her funeral in Westminster Abbey on September 19.

Flightradar24 is one of the popular plane-tracking tools. The site was started in Sweden in 2006 and became publicly accessible after three years. The first significant moment of mainstream attention to the site came in 2010. This was when the eruption of Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull grounded and rerouted thousands of flights throughout North America and Europe.