Originally Posted by
aterpster
How about a squall line extending 1,000 miles across the intended flight track?
The FOC/Command Center/Network Manager would deal with that in the same way it currently does. If the UA was flying completely autonomously, then that kind of major weather system would be one of the use cases that it was designed to meet. There is research in hand with Decision Support Tools to provide just that kind of assistance to self-dispatching operators. Aircraft these days fly in a sea of usually discarded/disregarded information.