Eli5: How come flies don’t smash into the back window inside a moving vehicle while they’re flying around? Surely they don’t fly “with” the vehicle.

Question

Eli5: How come flies don’t smash into the back window inside a moving vehicle while they’re flying around? Surely they don’t fly “with” the vehicle.

In: Physics

Answer 1

>How come flies don’t smash into the back window inside a moving vehicle while they’re flying around? Surely they don’t fly “with” the vehicle.

They do. The same way that your body moves “with” the body of an aircraft.

When you are on a plane, if you drop something in your seat… what happens? It just falls like you would expect it to and lands on your lap or the floor. It isn’t ripped out of your hand at hundreds of miles an hour and slammed into your chest.

The contents of the plane (and the contents of the interior of the car cabin) are moving *relative* to the body of the vehicle, not to the surface of the Earth.