The Seattle Seahawks are scheduled to face the Las Vegas Raiders at Allegiant Stadium for their final game before their bye week, but there will need to be extra monitoring of their flight schedule heading into Saturday.
Travel plans were disrupted throughout the United States on Friday afternoon after the Federal Aviation Administration announced a nationwide ground stop on Friday afternoon. The FAA said in official statement that there were “communication issues impacting multiple Air Route Traffic
Control Centers.” As of about 5:15 pm PT, the ground stop has been lifted. More than 7,000 flights were canceled on Friday, and nearly 2,000 Saturday flights have already been canceled. There will be continued delays throughout the rest of Friday and likely longer.
“Our switches, our routers, actually got overloaded with data […] and they started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said.
“I believe that it’s going to take us some time to get back to capacity,” Duffy added.
Seahawks head coach Mike Macdonald was made aware of the outage during his media availability.
“We’ll play it by ear and we’ll adjust to how we need to adjust,” Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald told reporters. “We have a plan for tomorrow and we’re leaving tomorrow, which helps obviously.”
Friday’s events have already directly impacted the Saturday college sports schedule. The Washington Huskies men’s basketball team will have their road game at the Utah Utes moved to Sunday, while the Auburn vs. Mississippi State football game was pushed back from noon ET to 3:15 pm PT to accommodate Auburn’s revised travel schedule. Meanwhile, the Huskies football team intends to fly to East Lansing on Friday night for their Saturday tilt with Michigan State, but as of this article’s publish the kickoff time has not been changed.
The Seahawks will take their charter flight to Las Vegas on Saturday, and hopefully any delays are either minimal or non-existent now that the order has been lifted. Unfortunately, some Seahawks fans we asked on social media are affected by their intended weekend Vegas getaway.
