According to aviation tracker website Flightradar24, about five million people followed along online as the deceased Queen was flown from Edinburgh to London on September 13.
That number is derived from two sources — 4.79 million people who followed the flight’s journey on Flightradar24’s website and mobile app, plus an additional 296,000 who tracked the plane on YouTube.
That smashes the previous record, achieved just last month during US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s controversial visit to Taiwan. Her plane’s journey to Taipei was tracked by about 2.9 million people.
From Northolt, the Queen’s coffin was taken to Buckingham Palace. On Wednesday, September 14 the coffin will be escorted to Westminster Hall, Parliament, where the Queen will lie in state until her funeral on Monday, September 19 in Westminster Abbey.
Flightradar24 is one of several increasingly popular plane-tracking tools. The site began in Sweden in 2006 and became publicly accessible three years later.
Flightradar24 staffers knew that the Queen’s final air voyage had the potential to become tremendously popular. Their team tried to provide as much website stability as possible, but the massive influx of new users proved a technical challenge. As the stability of the site suffered, they implemented additional measures to ensure Flightradar24 remained accessible to as many users as possible and users unable to access the site could continue to follow the flight via live stream.
According to cnn
