List of birds by flight speed
This is a list of the fastest flying birds in the world. A bird's velocity is necessarily variable; a hunting bird will reach much greater speeds while diving to catch prey than when gliding. The bird with the greatest airspeed velocity is the Peregrine falcon, able to exceed 321.8 km/h (200 mph) in its hunting dives. The greatest self-powered horizontal speed is achieved by Homing Racing Pigeons. They can fly 1100 km (700 miles) in a single day, and they have been recorded flying at 177 km/h (110 miles per hour), making them the birds with the fastest speed ever recorded on a self-powered flight, and the fastest endurance flight.
Fly
Flies have rapid reflexes that aid their escape from predators but their sustained flight speeds are low. Dolichopodid flies in the genus "Condylostylus" respond in less than 5 milliseconds to camera flashes by taking flight. In the past, the deer bot fly, "Cephenemyia", was claimed to be one of the fastest insects on the basis of an estimate made visually by Charles Townsend in 1927. This claim, of speeds of 600 to 800 miles per hour, was regularly repeated until Irving Langmuir showed it to be physically impossible as well as incorrect. Langmuir suggested an estimated speed of 25 miles per hour.