The effects of the Federal Aviation Administration’s historic ground stop on Friday have hit more than one NFL referee.
The four-hour stoppage that put a stop to flights across the nation has forced three more NFL officials to work a double shift on Sunday, officiating two different games in different states, ESPN reported.
Referee Don Willard, who normally works as a side judge, was initially set for double assignment Saturday.
Umpire Terry Killens, field judge Jabir Walker and side judge Justin Larrew followed.
All will work the Dolphins-Colts 1 p.m. game in Indianapolis before driving 110 miles to work the Steelers-Bengals game in Cincinnati for “Sunday Night Football.”
The NFL adjusted assignments to reassign officials to games within driving distance of their respective hometowns.
The league also has a backup referee set for all 17 of its officiating crews if needed.
“Due to the ongoing nationwide impact to air travel this weekend, the NFL has adjusted its officiating assignments for Week 10 games, reassigning officials to games within driving distance of their hometowns,” the NFL said in a statement shared to multiple media outlets.
Flights across the U.S. were thrown into chaos on Friday following a communications issue stemming from old technology getting “overloaded,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said.
“The President for the last year has been asking Congress to fully fund a full build of a brand new air traffic control system,” Duffy said. “So we have TDM, telecom, so this is analog telecom. Our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data and they went down and — I shouldn’t say they went down — they started to give us inconsistency in the data, from those, from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down.”
It was the second nationwide ground stop since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Over 2,000 flights were canceled, which forced professional and college athletes to look for alternate transportation over the weekend.
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