Tens of thousands of mourners who thought they were lined up to see the Queen’s coffin at Westminster Hall have been told it’s actually just the check-in queue for Qantas at London Heathrow.
The queue, which stretches from Heathrow Terminal 3, across the west London suburbs of Chiswick, Hammersmith and Chelsea, all the way back to the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace, is a normal part of the Qantas check-in procedure, officials said.
One couple, who had been waiting for over 14 hours to see the Queen lying in state, said they were devastated when they got to the front of the queue and were asked for their boarding pass. “We were hoping to pay our respects to Her Majesty, but instead we were given seating options for QF2 to Singapore,” Doris and Ronald Springer from Reading said. “What’s worse, we were told minutes later the flight had been cancelled”.
A second queue alongside the original queue, which initially confused those waiting, was confirmed to be for Qantas baggage retrieval.
