One of the things that makes me a little skeptical is the lousy image quality of the photo in the first post on this thread. It looks like something taken with a cellphone that my teen niece would post on Facebook. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it doesn't look like the work of a professional photographer to me.
However, Christine Negroni responds to a claim of image manipulation with the information that she did a Picasa edit on the photos to make a montage for publication on her blog. From the comment section of the WestJet post:
Anthony says:
March 10, 2017 at 4:07 pm
It’s photoshopped. As a Graphic Designer, I have taken the opportunity to test the “Missed Approach” image in comparison to the “Good Approach” image and found many inconsistencies and artifacts which comes from a manipulated image.
Reply
Christine Negroni says:
March 10, 2017 at 4:53 pm
Anthony, Christine Garner is a professional aviation photographer with whom I have worked in the past for the prestigious Air & Space magazine. She is a woman of integrity and both of us take our professional responsibilities seriously. The image presented in the post is the image she shot and is NOT photoshopped. The final image with the caption, missed approach and good approach is a montage produced by me from her original images in the Picasa photo program. If there are “inconsistencies and artifacts” or something that suggests manipulation it must be related to putting two photos in one composite image. Christine Negroni
I've certainly had the experience of posting an online album of sharp edited photos of a family event only to have someone mix them with blurry, grainy cellphone pictures and have them downsampled to 20K thumbnails by Instagram and then resized back to original size with hideous results.
Again, about the only other published photography from Christine Garner that I can find online is in this article:
Under the Big Jets | Flight Today | Air & Space Magazine
From Christine G.'s online albums, it looks to me like she probably edits in Lightroom but I haven't found anything to confirm this.
Her son vouches for her integrity:
Bill Garner says:
March 10, 2017 at 5:47 pm
If you knew my mother (the photographer) you’d know that the image has not been photoshopped. It just isn’t in her character to fabricate something like this. Has anyone considered that they may have hit an air pocket and dropped suddenly?
There is a comment from another poster who says he also witnessed the event:
Trevor says:
March 10, 2017 at 4:44 pm
Allow me to address some of you experts – this photo was not photoshopped – I was in St Maarten and also witnessed the whole incident. I have been coming here annually for 16 years to photograph the aircraft and have never witnessed an aircraft so low. Rather than blame the pilots I prefer to give them a “great save”. The reason it took 45 minutes for the go around was that ATC closed the airport after the first Westjet approach. I was listening on my scanner
It does look like the airport was indeed closed for a while, INC 522 (Dominican Wings) and KLM 729 went into holding as well. KLM landed just before WJA 2652 and INC apparently diverted somewhere else.