The Powerful Way The Royal Air Force Paid Tribute Queen Elizabeth On Her Journey Back To London

The Royal Air Force could have used any aircraft to transport Queen Elizabeth’s coffin from Scotland to London, but as a final farewell, they deliberately selected a plane with a registration that was close to her nickname. The RAF C-17 Master they used had a registration “ZZI77,” which, if flipped, reads something close to “Lizz.”

“Now we all know that very few people would ever call Her Late Majesty anything but Elizabeth but this was a lovely touch by the @RoyalAirForce to use this registration aircraft for her final flight,” wrote Captain Dave Wellsworth on Twitter. According to the Royal Air Force, the plane they chose is often used “for combat, peacekeeping or humanitarian missions worldwide.” It also happened to have carried thousands of people escaping Taliban in Kabul last year, per The Telegraph.

There was much fanfare over this particular aircraft when it carried Queen Elizabeth’s coffin. According to aviation tracker website Flightradar24, roughly five million tracked the plane online during the one hour and 12-minute flight it took from Edinburgh to London. “Seventy years after her first flight as Queen aboard the BOAC Argonaut ‘Atalanta,’ Queen Elizabeth II’s final flight is the most tracked flight in Flightradar24 history,” Flightradar24 Director of Communications wrote in an email (via Euro News).