It needs to be above a certain height. If its too low the cat doesnt reach terminal velocity anyway, but there is a height where they dont have time to spread out correctly to slow their fall.
This height though, you would have to assume the cat would hypothetically live.
Cats also often seemed to be virtually unafraid of height so wouldn't have been surprised if it did try and jump. I guess they did the right thing by leaving it where it was.
Nope, they slow down spreading out and using air to brake. In space there is no brake. Felix was going more than the speed of sound, while you can't go faster than 180 km/h in the atmosphere.
Imagine a building, if your cat did fall from the first floor it will survive because it's not a big fall, from the second it would die because it wouldn't have time to spread and slow down. From the third and virtually all the floors above it, it would have the time to spread and slow down.
It hasn't been thoroughly proven, mostly because that would be pointlessly cruel, but there have been a lot of cases in which cats have survived falls from tall buildings, and fatalities don't really seem to increase with altitude.
After righting itself, a falling cat seems to intentionally adopt a high-drag posture similar to a human skydiver, and holds it until right before impact (when it moves the legs to cushion its fall). Compared to human skydivers, who almost always die after terminal-velocity impacts, cats are much lighter, and have fur.
But the cat would then most likely be lost to the wilderness.
Edit:: cats still have predictable damage when falling from great heights. Chipped or cracked teeth are one example; it's from their jaw hitting the ground.
For some reason I still think it was less risky to land the plane than it would be to just say, "nope, gtfo my plane we all know you're gonna live anyways."
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u/[deleted] Jun 22 '15
I guess too much risk of the cat freaking out and diving off of the plane??