Can someone explain how this pic was taken?

[Smoketoomuch]

SB sez;
"Its simply down to perspective which is NOT compromised by shutter speed, film quality etc"
"Try it draw a circle and view it from different angles. That image was not captured on his film in his camera"

You make the mistake of assuming the camera sees what the human eye sees, and it most definitely does not. You cannot recreate the perspective of a photograph by merely drawing lines on a piece of paper and viewing them at different angles.

Without getting into the fake/real argument;
Long telephoto lenses distort one thing above all others and that is perspective. They foreshorten the image and make near and distant objects appear much closer together. A 400mm lens might make things appear 12X bigger, but they also make near and distant objects appear 12 times closer together - if we could see all the LAX runway in the photo then the foreshortening would trick our eyes and brain into thinking it wasn't 12,000 ft. long but a mere 1000 ft, although our knowledge tends to override the urge to fall for this illusion if we have the 'whole picture' as it were.

Try to ignore the background in the picture for a second, and just look at the aircraft. It is heading straight for the camera and without the background you have absolutely no idea how high the nose is, the only thing that gives you any clue whatsoever to the nose up angle is the background, but remember, you are seeing a heavily distorted background due to the foreshortening of the long lens, and it is this that makes it seem much more nose up than it is in reality. The section of runway visible in the photo might be 1000 ft long, but it 'appears' to be less than 100 ft. long due to the distorted perspective. Your brain subconsciously does the trigonometry and arrives at an estimate for the nose up angle, but it's making that calculation on seriously flawed data.

If we do the real trigonometry we can work out how much your brain is being deceived by. A bit of basic trigonometry gives you the 'apparent' nose up angle if you reduce the 'apparent' horizontal distance by a factor of 12, and it has a huge effect - i.e. a 10 degree nose up angle suddenly becomes an 65 degree apparent nose up angle [from opposite/adjacent = tan]. In reality the effect will be slightly less pronounced because the vertical distances are distorted too, albeit to a lesser extent, but I find it quite believable that a long lens could make 10° look more like 60 or so.