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(CNN) — The plane carrying Queen Elizabeth II’s casket has broken records and become the most watched flight.
This number comes from two sources – 4.79 million people watched the flight on the Fluladar24 website and mobile app, and a further 296,000 watched the flight on YouTube.
The Royal Air Force plane spent an hour and 12 minutes in flight, putting the Queen to shame. It landed at RAF Northolt, a military base six miles from Heathrow Airport in Greater London.
An RAF C-17 Globemaster aircraft transported Her Majesty’s coffin.
Andrew Matthews / Pool / AFP / Getty Images
Flightradar24 is one of many popular aircraft tracking tools. The site was launched in Sweden in 2006 and became publicly accessible three years later.
The site’s communications director, Ian Petchenick, told CNN Travel that the traffic was “really our first ambition for international events and how showing air traffic in real time to the public can impact the way people think about world news.”
Prior to Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, the most popular flight search on Flaradar24 was opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s return flight to Russia in 2015. He is due to go to prison upon his arrival in 2021.
The staff at Flightradar24 knew the Queen’s last air journey had the potential to be a hit. Their team tried to provide as much website stability as possible, but the high flow of new users was a technical challenge.
“This was an immediate, massive increase that exceeded our expectations,” Petchenik wrote in a blog post. He added: “In total, we fielded 76.2 million queries related to this flight — whether that’s a user action, clicking the flight icon, clicking the box on the left side of the flight information, or adjusting settings.”
This particular flight search record is predicted to remain unbroken “for a long time”.
Top Image: The Queen’s coffin is met by pallbearers at RAF Northolt. Credit: Andrew Matthews/AP/Getty
CNN’s Jacopo Prisco reports.
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