Here's a link to the people out of Huntsville, AL who do a lot of survey acquisition work in America, and did the collection effort noted in the Reddit post below. [1]

The About Us video shows some of the planes, equipment, collection flights, survey patterns, and data applications for the collection efforts. Other pages have notes on the planes and work done.

[1] Revolution Flight, Survey Subunit, https://www.surveyaircraft.com/about-us

speculating: Lidar from a plane?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Albany/comments/1hdxkz0/comment/m1z...

Imagine a route like this, except many lanes. I was trying to find a pic I saw the other day of one over NYC