Sharks Stuck in San Jose, Nets Halted in New Orleans: The Ground Stop Lifts, but the Weekend Travel Scramble Goes On

The San Jose Sharks finished practice on Friday expecting to board a charter for Salt Lake City. The plane never left. Just after the session wrapped, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered every flight in the country to stay on the ground, and the Sharks stayed home in San Jose with their trip on hold, Sharks Hockey Digest reported.

San Jose is scheduled to face the Utah Mammoth on Saturday at 7 p.m. Mountain time at the Delta Center. As of Friday evening, the club had not announced a new departure time and said it would share an update when it had one. The Deseret News, which covers the Mammoth closely, also reported that Utah's next opponent had been grounded by the nationwide stoppage.

The good news arrived Friday night. The FAA lifted the nationwide ground stop in the evening, and the flight-tracking service Flightradar24 put the end of the order at 01:15 UTC, or 8:15 p.m. Eastern. Live coverage from CP24 reported that the halt had wiped out thousands of flights and that it would take some time for operations to return to normal.

That leaves the Sharks a workable path to Utah. Hockey insider Elliotte Friedman told Sharks Hockey Digest that the game would not be called off as long as San Jose could still fly in and arrive before the scheduled start. In other words, the league was prepared to wait on the facts rather than rush to scrap a game, and with departures moving again, a Saturday flight is back on the table.

The Sharks had plenty of company. The Brooklyn Nets had already boarded their plane in New Orleans for the short hop to Memphis when the order came down, and the flight was halted, NBC New York reported. The Associated Press reported that NBA, NHL and college teams across the country were caught in the stoppage, while the Florida Panthers were among the clubs that reached their destinations before the order took effect.

The AP described the sudden halt as throwing the entire sports weekend into chaos. That is not an overstatement. Friday afternoon is when road teams in nearly every sport board their charters, and the order landed squarely in that window.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the trouble was a communications issue affecting the country's regional air traffic control centers. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin later called it a telecommunications outage and said there was "no indication as of yet" that anything nefarious was behind it, the AP reported. That answer mattered to every traveler in the country, athletes included.

A hockey schedule is built on back-to-backs and quick road swings, and it only works because a team plane is waiting at a private terminal a couple of hours after the final horn. Take the plane away for even one afternoon, and a club's travel staff is suddenly rewriting hotels, meals, practice times and game-day routines on the fly.

Friday was a reminder that the people who keep a season moving rarely get noticed until something breaks. Travel directors, equipment managers, pilots, air traffic controllers and the technicians who spent the evening bringing the system back all deserve credit tonight. So do the leagues, for keeping games on the schedule while the facts came in instead of guessing.

There is also a lesson here for the rest of us. A nation that depends on its airspace as much as ours does needs that system to be sturdy, and Friday's outage showed how quickly one failure can ripple into every corner of American life, from family vacations to a Saturday night hockey game in Salt Lake City.

Saturday is the real test. The Sharks still need to get from San Jose to Utah in time for puck drop, and the Nets still need to finish their trip to Memphis. Before the order was lifted, the AP reported that the FAA had offered no timeline for restarting flights, which put weekend games at risk. The skies are open again, but with thousands of cancellations to work through, airlines will be busy well into the weekend.

For fans in Salt Lake City, the bottom line for now is simple: the game is still on the schedule. Check the teams' official channels on Saturday before heading to the arena, and say a word of thanks for the folks who got the skies open again.