Climbing Over a Front

Climbing up to our cruise altitude on our way from San Francisco (KSFO) to Honolulu (PHNL) in a Qantas 747-8i up ahead we see a weather front extending all across the horizon. There's no way around it.

The tops look to be above our current altitude and the radar looks bad. Will our climb get us up to the clear air "on top" before we hit the leading edge wall of clouds with embedded turbulence and who knows what other kinds of bad stuff?

The cool thing here is this front was actual RW weather imported by FS2020 and was shown in this position on RW weather forecast maps for this routing. Super cool!

[click on the shots for a full screen view]

ATC has just cleared us to FL280 enroute to our final cruise altitude of FL390. Up ahead there's a wall to wall front.

All that red on the weather radar is not good. Visually eyeballing things from where we're at we can see we're currently below the tops as we come up on FL220 and 280 kind of looks like its going to put us right in them.

ATC just gave us FL390. The race is on to get above this. The radar shows about 25 miles to the leading edge.

Passing FL280 looks like we're just going to top things

On top with some room to spare crossing the the front. Smooth sailing from here.