Flight carrying Queen Elizabeth II's coffin most tracked in history

LONDON -

The plane that took Queen Elizabeth II's coffin to London from Edinburgh on Tuesday is the most tracked flight in history, according to Flightradar24.

The global flight tracking service says the Royal Air Force (RAF) flight carrying the late monarch's coffin set an "all-time flight tracking record" with five million people following the plane's journey to RAF Northolt.

According to a blog post on Flightradar24's website, 4.79 million people followed the flight across Flightradar24 web and mobile app services, in addition to 296,000 who tracked the plane via the tracking service's YouTube live stream.

The previously most-tracked flight on Flightradar24 was U.S. politician Nancy Pelosi's plane to Taiwan in August which was followed by 2.2 million people.

The company says six million people were attempting to track the Queen's flight within the first minute of the aircraft's transponder activating.

"Prior to the flight’s departure, we implemented a number of traffic calming measures to provide our platform with as much stability as possible… we expected a large influx of users, but this immediate, massive spike was beyond what we had anticipated," the company said.

Flightradar24 said approximately 600,000 people were able to "successfully follow the flight before performance degraded."

"Even though our platform suffered under such heavy load, Queen Elizabeth II's final flight from Edinburgh to RAF Northolt is by far the all-time most tracked flight on Flightradar24 and will likely remain at the top for a long while," the company said.

Queen Elizabeth II, the Queen of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand since 1952, died last week. She was 96.