I've been doing aerial survey for 6months, specifically pictometry, the technical term for taking pretty pictures out of an aircraft!
You'll notice as you zoom in the image all of a sudden improves dramatically, that's the change from satellite to aircraft.
"But surely you have satellites which have excellent resolution, why not just use those"
Well from what I understand there is two problems with that, firstly certainly in the civilian world you don't have satellites with that ability, also you'd be repositioning a satellite to specific points all over the world, a costly and lengthy process for all of the world in that resolution, also you could have a satellite sat over Paris waiting for no cloud when London is clear, an aircraft is quicker and more effective at repositioning quickly to the clear sky.
The way pictometry works is some clever people in an office figure out how your going to fly a specific targets, mainly how the lines are going to be positioned and spaced, then as the pilot you go to that area and fly racetrack patterns (or mowing the lawn, whichever analogy you prefer!) covering the whole area. I've seen photos where the target happened to be over a railway track, and it just happened to coincided with the aircraft taking its picture of the track at the same point a train travelled along it, result was a 5 mile long train! There is also a great deal of overlap on the photos, so put those two factors in and what your seeing at Stansted almost certainly all wasn't taken at the same time. Also some targets don't get done in one day, i've taken weeks on some targets, maybe flying a couple of lines a day.
You also get two sorts of aerial photography, one where the aircraft is 30,000ft up doing a half decent map so everyone has their house taken with better resolution than a satellite can provide (probably why you can see your house) then another aircraft at lower lever (3000-6000) does the really high resolution mapping for major towns and cities.
But where the money comes from this, I have no idea!
Hope that helps