Guinness World Records confirms flight of Queen Elizabeth II's coffin as most tracked ever

Sept. 17 (UPI) -- The flight carrying Queen Elizabeth II's coffin from Scotland to London on Tuesday was the most-tracked ever recorded, Guinness World Records confirmed Friday.

The Royal Air Force Globemaster C-17 aircraft took off from Edinburgh Airport in Scotland at 5:20 p.m. on Tuesday and landed at RAF Northolt just over an hour later.

The record keepers confirmed data from Flightradar24, an online flight tracker, which showed that 4.79 million users kept up with the progress of the queen's final flight and that around 6 million people had tried to click in within the first minute of the plane's transponder activating.

The flight carrying the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II "shattered the record" for the most tracked flight of all time, nearly doubling the record set just last month by Nancy Pelosi on her flight to Taiwan, a news release from Flightradar24 reads.

Ian Petchenik with Flightradar24 said on the company's podcast AvTalk that the company expected it to be a "very well-tracked flight."

"It was well tracked but much more well tracked than we thought it would be," Petchenik said on the podcast.

Petchenik said that the flight was so well-tracked that it caused logistical problems for Flightradar24's platform. The flight can still be tracked on the company's website.

"The problem here is that it wasn't a few hundred thousand," Petchenik said. "It was 6 million people."

He added that there were another 200,000 people incorrectly tracking a Turkish Airlines flight sitting on the ground at Edinburgh. About 600,000 were successful before the site implemented "traffic calming measures."