Is falling a mode of flying? I frequently observe people arguing (on this very web site) about the question if falling is a mode of flying or not. It appears to me that the majority of people have a strong opinion that it is not.

Surely it is a matter of definition. I made the effort to look it up in a number of online dictionaries. Most sources provide many possible options to define flight, like Merriam-Webster:


  1a : an act or instance of passing through the air by the use of
  wings


but it continues with


  2a : a passing through the air or through space outside the earth's
  atmosphere


Wikipedia tried to put everything into one paragraph:


   Flight is the process by which an object moves through an atmosphere (or beyond it, as in the case of spaceflight) without contact with the surface. This can be achieved by generating aerodynamic lift associated with propulsive thrust, aerostatically using buoyancy, or by ballistic movement. 


Flight may be aerodynamic, propulsive, aerostatic, or ballistic.

When one throws a ball, the ball is flying. It flies until it hits anything else than air. Why would it be different if the ball is thrown upwards, or pushed downwards, or just dropped?

In my understanding, falling is just a very special case of flying. Is this correct?
Since falling is just the final result of a ballistic arc if you let it go long enough, and ballistic arcs are considered "flight" per the Oxford Dictionary (as in the ballistic arcs of balls, spacecraft, arrows, etc being considered "flights"), then technically, a falling object is in flight.   

You could give it just the tiniest lateral push when you drop it so it goes down with a slight ballistic curve;  in the end, no different from driving it laterally so it has horizontal energy/inertia with a high velocity that exactly counteracts gravitational pull, and give it a vacuum so it can do that indefinitely - a satellite - , the only difference being that and the ball being the location in or out of the atmosphere and energy put into it.

In other words, orbital vehicles, baseballs, bullets, are all "falling" and are technically in flight, and so is a ball you drop straight down... if the Oxford Dictionary definition is what you want to use.

In my own airplane, if I push over with just the right elevator input, and go zero G, my plane is now in a ballistic arc.  The wings are superfluous, for a few seconds anyway, and my plane is "falling", just not straight down.  So if you accept that in that condition it is still "flying", the falling is flight.