The Seahawks’ trip to Las Vegas is in a holding pattern after Friday’s nationwide FAA ground stop briefly threw travel schedules across the country into chaos.
Seattle is set to face the Raiders at Allegiant Stadium in its final game before the bye week, and the team’s charter flight is scheduled for Saturday. That means there’s still time for the Seahawks to get where they need to go, but the day’s air traffic mess has put a spotlight on the itinerary.
The FAA announced the ground stop Friday afternoon because of “communication issues impacting multiple Air Route Traffic Control Centers.” By about 5:15 p.m.
PT, the restriction had been lifted, but the disruption was already widespread. More than 7,000 flights were canceled Friday, and nearly 2,000 more Saturday flights had already been scrapped.
Delays were expected to linger through the rest of Friday and likely beyond.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said, “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,”
He added, “I believe that it’s going to take us some time to get back to capacity,”
Mike Macdonald said the Seahawks were aware of the situation during his media availability and that the team would stay flexible if needed.
“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.”
The travel mess has already altered other college sports plans for Saturday. Washington’s men’s basketball game at Utah will now be played Sunday, while Auburn’s football game against Mississippi State was moved from noon ET to 3:15 pm PT because of Auburn’s revised travel schedule. Washington’s football team still plans to fly to East Lansing on Friday night for its Saturday game against Michigan State, though the kickoff time had not changed as of publication.
For the Seahawks, the hope is that Saturday’s flight goes off with little drama now that the ground stop has been lifted. For some fans, though, the weekend trip to Vegas was already caught in the fallout.
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