Even in death, Queen Elizabeth II is still making headlines and commanding attention. According to online flight tracker Flightradar24, more than five million people tracked the Royal Air Force plane carrying the late Queen’s coffin, making it the most tracked flight in the site’s history.
On Wednesday of this week, the late Queen’s coffin was flown from Edinburgh, Scotland to RAF Northolt near London on a flight that lasted one hour and 12 minutes. Within the first minute of the plane’s transponder activating, six million people attempted to track the flight carrying the late Queen, Flightradar explained in a blog post. This influx of traffic put “unprecedented strain,” on Flightradar24’s platform, and it buckled.
“We prepared for a large influx of visitors and were ready with mitigation efforts, but we did not anticipate that 6 million people would attempt to follow the flight in less than a minute,” Mikael Robertsson, cofounder of Flightradar24, told Gizmodo in an emailed statement. “We’re working on multiple projects to continue improving site capacity as we’re seeing a fast-growing interest in flight tracking.”
In the end, about five million people — 4.79 million on Flightradar24’s website and app, as well as 296,000 via livestream on its YouTube channel — were able to follow Queen Elizabeth II’s final flight, which used the call sign “Kittyhawk.” This was the name used for any flight that carried Queen Elizabeth II onboard, the BBC reported.
Although Flightradar24 ended up only accommodating five million viewers, it processed more than 76 million actions — such as clicks on the flight’s icon, clicks on the plane’s info box, clicks on the aircraft’s photo display, among others — by people who were following the flight. In other words, people were definitely engaged with flight.
Robertsson definitely has the numbers to back up his claim. The late Queen’s flight broke Flightradar24’s records and is most-tracked flight in the site’s history, a distinction the site’s operators speculate she will keep for a while. In a distant second is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s flight to Taiwan back in August, which was followed by 2.92 million spectators on Flightradar24.
Queen Elizabeth’s coffin is currently lying in state at Westminster Hall in Parliament, where she will remain until her funeral next Monday.