Don't ever think there is a "safe height" over the top, many pilots do not understand the prevalence of a lightening discharge to the ionosphere, quite apart from the fact that a rising TCu/TS will outclimb any civil jet.
That's a good advice that I take home from this thread today. Better to be safe than sorry. Some captains adopt the daredevil approach and that might have rubbed off onto me. Somewhere down the line, I started believing that I'm not worth my salt if the captain chooses an optimal deviation compared to me. So I started to shrink my margins. In hindsight, that might not be the best approach. Have to accept the fact that experience can never be substituted.
* As a matter of info, as we approached the weather depicted in the image above, we took the same path of the guys ahead of us. We switched to manual and set the scan level to something like FL300, where we still had some green returns... Guess what ? Not even a light chop as we went thru ! *
Thanks B737SFP. Just for my better understanding, wouldn't your planned route be the safer one to fly through, looking at the weather radar picture ?
Denti... Yeah exactly. The older MSN's have the issue of adjusting GAIN to +4 / CAL on every climb and descent. The later ones have the option of leaving it at CAL gain all the way through.