Excellent Photo
KPAE, the home of The Boeing Company and ATS, a major independent airliner overhaul facility has a long history of such flights.
It is interesting that others have referred to this low pass as a Top Gun stunt. Top Gun's air-to-air photography was done using a Lear Jet with top and bottom mounted servo driven cameras to get the "gee whiz" dog fight pictures in that film. It was also used to get some of the air-to-air shots used in common airline TV advertising.
I have participated in a number of such ground shots at KPAE and one done from the Lear Jet. This Lear flight was to film a Boeing airliner take off, landing, and cruise series of video shots for TV advertising. It called for the airliner to be on KPAE 16R’s take off position while the Lear approached the field from the north. The Lear called for the airliner’s throttle up and brake release as it lined up just west of 16R with its speed slow enough to track the airliner’s take off roll through lift off and climb out.
The landing sequence was a bit more interesting. The airliner did a short final approach to 34L with the Lear, tracked in formation through the turn, and descent through touchdown. The Lear was over a taxiway and climbed out to get back in the pattern for its landing. All of this was very precisely preplanned, and to my knowledge met with the airline’s ops requirements. It did require that both pilots had formation flying skills that are not practiced in normal airline flying.
There are two types of pilots that I have encountered over twenty-five years of this process. The airline “line” pilots that fly passenger loaded airplanes every day are highly skilled and very comfortable with the routine flight procedures, but had some trouble with the typical post maintenance test flights that deviated from the normal routines. Many airlines use specific crews for doing post maintenance test flights that are better trained for such activities. Ferry flights and test flights are conducted under rules, but different rules from revenue passenger flights.
It is unfortunate that the subject flight caused concern. It appears that it ran afoul of CP’s internal procedures.