I assume it’s a 100% chance of death for the fly but IDK. Maybe they can stay in the air long enough to slow down? I’m not sure how fly flight can work at that speed.
I think what’s more amazing is that we couldn’t come up with a more creative name for flies.
Reminds me of a two partner joke I made up when I was eight or nine.
What do you call a fly without wings?
A walk.
What do you call a frying pan with legs?
A wok.
So birds can get their wings broken by sudden gusts while aloft. Without accounting for size (reynolds number) and reaction speed - a fly would suffer a similar fate.
But I’ve seen videos of insects and/or flies hit with directed blasts of air. They react very, very quickly by adjusting orientation and shape. If a fly tucks fast enough it might survive the aerodynamic forces due to its reaction speed, and be left to the fate of where it’s path goes while it slows to a flyable speed.
And size matters. What seems to us a thin and uniform body of air gas for them is thicker and rippling with waves of density and speed. The wrong placement might kill them with pure shear or high pressure, but I suspect they have the ability to surf those waves as well, and maybe even use them to steer through extreme conditions.
I always assumed they just get pissed off because now they’re no where near their fly family and fly house
Really small things are really good at surviving anything involving gravity.
But it’s not a 0-75 acceleration either. They’d be sucked out and fine a second later. The danger would be getting pulled around the car due to its aerodynamics, putting it directly in front of the next windshield in traffic.
This. When your mass is so small, you live in a very different world than we do - momentum and gravity are tiny forces on you, but others such as air resistance and static are huge. Additionally they don’t have the sort of inner-ear positioning system we do - so no real sense of “up” and “down” that would be recognizable to us - so probably the inevitable tumbling motion as you are sucked out of the window would not be disorientating to the fly the way it would be to a big animal.
So the answer is they will likely be fine. From their point of view the blob of air they are flying around in gets sucked out the window and they are just traveling in it. I imagine they would notice the acceleration, but it’s a tiny force on them. The sudden distortion to the block of air (being stretched out to fill the sudden low pressure zone outside of the car window) would be a big deal to the fly, but I don’t think enough to damage them.
Source: idle speculation, and a long standing interest in cats surviving huge falls.
