(CNN) – The plane carrying Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin has broken records for the most tracked flight ever.
That number was derived from two sources – 4.79 million people who followed the flight on Flightradar24’s website and mobile app, as well as another 296,000 people who followed the plane on YouTube.
The Royal Air Force plane carrying the Queen spent an hour and 12 minutes in flight. It landed at RAF Northolt, a military station about six miles from Heathrow Airport in Greater London.
An RAF C-17 Globemaster flew Her Majesty’s coffin.
Andrew Matthews/Paul/AFP/Getty Images
Flightradar24 is one of the many increasingly popular aircraft tracking tools. The site started in Sweden in 2006 and became publicly available three years later.
Ian Pechenek, the website’s director of communications, told CNN Travel that the surge in traffic “was definitely our first foray into international events, and how displaying air traffic to an audience in real time can influence how people think about world news.”
Prior to Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, the most popular flight search on Flightradar24 was opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s trip to Russia, where he would be imprisoned upon arrival in 2021.
Flightradar24 staff knew the Queen’s last flight was likely to be very popular. Their team tried to provide as much website stability as possible, but the massive influx of new users proved to be a technical challenge.
“This instant massive rise was well beyond what we were expecting,” Pechenek wrote in a blog post. “In all, we processed 76.2 million requests related to this flight alone – that’s any user action, such as clicking on the flight icon, clicking on aircraft information in the left box, or modifying settings,” he added.
This flight search history is expected to remain unchanged for an “extended period”.
Top photo: The Queen’s casket is met by casket bearers at RAF Northolt. Credit: Andrew Matthews/AP/Getty
CNN’s Jacobo Brisco contributed reporting.
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