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Being that The Flash is obviously very fast, it is also very obvious that he can run into things at a very great great speed an still live.

Eg, when he pushes off Superman in Justice League and thrown back at a speed which looks like it is way faster than terminal velocity:

So the question is: Could the Flash survive a landing at terminal velocity?

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    I'm not sure "terminal velocity" means what you think it means, as regular humans survive terminal velocity, which simply means the velocity that a falling body reaches at which they can't go any faster due to things like air resistance slowing them down. People parachuting will reach terminal velocity. In fact, the problem in general with surviving fast speeds isn't the speed itself at all, but the acceleration and deceleration to get you going that fast. The Flash can survive such acceleration since he does that all the time by running at full speed off the bat.
    – Kai
    Dec 8, 2019 at 12:21
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    @Kai is right. It's not the falling that kills you, it's the landing.
    – Spencer
    Dec 8, 2019 at 13:56
  • Falling from a plane and descending by parachute is a completely different thing. Terminal velocity (steady speed achieved by an object freely falling through a gas or liquid ) of a falling human is appropriately around 150–180 mph. So the question is can the flash survive hitting the ground at that speed?
    – KyloRen
    Dec 8, 2019 at 14:00
  • I've updated your question based on your comments.
    – Spencer
    Jan 2, 2020 at 18:07

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When you bump onto something (including the ground, after a free fall), what causes tissue damage and hurts you is not the bump itself, but the rapid decelaration; this deceleration, according to Newton's second law of motion, causes a force, which in turn causes the damage.

So, it would seem at first that whatever deceleration is experienced by the Flash when stopping from a terminal velocity of 150-180 mph by hitting the ground is just peanuts, compared with the self-imposed deceleration when he stops from speeds like ~2,500 mph, which seems to be his maximum achieved speed in the current TV incarnation (although I am old enough to remember him traveling faster than light, along with Superman, in the old comics).

Now, I'll confess that I am not that familiar with the specifics of the Flash's powers, and it would seem that he cannot control his speed while in mid-air, but again I am not sure that this changes the argument above: since he is able to handle decelerations from ~ 2,500 mph to stillness, a deceration from the free fall terminal speed of 150-180 mph shouldn't be a problem, at least in principle. And if this is not enough, I guess he can always resort to vibrating/phasing, which does not seem to require firm ground to stand upon.

In fact, now that I am thinking of it, I guess this could serve as giving him a limited invulnerability against certain things; not an all-encompassing one like Superman's - more like a specific, nuanced one, like Wolverine's. I imagine that this must have been shown in-universe, but, as already said, I'm not that familiar with the character...

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Actually a few, a very few, normal persons have survived falling out of an airplane, or falling in a piece of an airplane, and reaching terminal velocity, and hitting the ground and decelerating rapidly.

Most of those very few survivors had extensive injuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fall_survivors1

So if a superhero has superpowers that help him withstand strong forces on their body that would kill or injure normal persons, the superhero should have a much stronger probability than a normal person of surviving falling from an airplane - though that much higher probability could still be very low, depending on the exact powers of the superhero.

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