Is this fake or real?!

Looks plausible to me. Rain does look like that, but you normally don't see it since it's usually all around you.

You see storms like this all the time in the southwest during monsoon season:

I don't doubt that rain looks like that but couldn't it have been photoshopped? Do you really think a commercial aircraft would be flying that close to the storm?

having only access to a 500px photo + it's post instagram filter makes it really hard to tell. i opened up the file in photoshop to see the file info, and apparently Instagram strips out all copyright and ownership information (kinda dodgy actually). i wasn't even able to see the date taken to cross reference it with the weather of NYC that day.

another thing to ask — has this *ever* happened in NYC according to weather records? If not, this is totally a fake.

Oh, it's hailing and raining hard today in NYC. That's why this photo is blowing up Twitter: "OMG check out the photo of the storm." But there's no way some dude is sitting on a commercial plane, snapping photos with Instragram filters, and pushing them out via WiFi? What's this, Virgin America?

@Josh lots of flights have wifi these days, and they could have snapped it out the window as the plane took off. There's nothing crazy about that situation - I bet people do that all the time. I still see no reason think it's fake at all.

Here's another shot I just found in my Facebook feed:

Oddly enough, the original Instagram photo is credited to Dhani Jones, the football player and Travel channel star. Or at least he's asking news organizations (ABC and Washington Post) for proper attribution on his Twitter feed: @dhanijones

Another argument that it's real ;)

Here's his twitter: twitter.com
And the original instagram link (Embed.ly stripped it out when we got the embeddable version)

instagram.com

And of course the original tweet: