The terminal velocity of a cat & survival chances on impact from 20,000 feet

While reading through ZZZ online | Number 176, I happened to take a look at the comments & came across an amuzing exchange (yes I was bored at the time too):

• Question Why would a person die if jumping from say a golden gate bridge into water?
  What if you fell in like pin straight, feet first, would that help the survival rate?
• If you can guarantee that you stay nice and pin-straight, you can cut the water, though it can still hurt like all get-out on the parts that hit water first. But if you don’t cut the water just right you’ll do yourself some serious damage, either killing yourself, knocking yourself out so you drown, or receiving serious enough injury so that you can’t swim and quickly drown. That’s 220 ft of fallin’ (just from the bridge deck to the water) to build up some speed. The water molecules can’t get out of your way fast enough at the speed you’ll be traveling and it will almost feel like hitting a solid surface. Yes, I’m bored at work.
• I think the more important question is: if you threw a cat off the Golden gate Bridge, would it land buttered side up?
• I hear that throwing a cat off before you jump will break the waters surface allowing you to survive said jump…
• Ah, but the cat has a lower terminal velocity than that of a flailing human. You’d have to throw it off with enough time allowance for it to drop the distance, cut the water and then paddle clear just before you hit. If you jump to late the waters will subside. Too early and the cat will hit you…
• All things fall evenly only in an evacuated environment. Add air, fur and surface area and things change. If all things fell at an even rate… ooer… horizontal and vertical components of displacement would be something entertaining to watch – aircraft would have to be launched in ballistic arcs from ground impulse… plus, of course under uniform gravity items would pick up velocity at 9.8 m/s/s until they either hit the ground or hit c…

  ah but the cat… yes. The cat would land buttered side down but would slip over so fast you would never tell.

• Cats leg muscles can absorbe the impact of them falling at their terminal velocity. You could chuck one out a plane at 20 thousand feet and it’d survive.

  Someone compiled data on (which probably means he cucked cats out of windows) it and found cats jumping from less than 3 stories did get injuries (but didn’t die)because they didn’t have time to orient themselves, but any higher than 3 stories and they were fine

• The potential flaw is this: the study was based only on cats that were brought into the hospital. Clearly dead cats, your basic fell-20-stories-and-looks-like-it-came-out-of-a-can-of-Spam cats, go to the Dumpster, not the emergency room. This may skew the statistics and make falls from great distances look safer than they are.

  Technically, if you studied statistics based on the number of skydiver injuries reported at hospitals and not the morgue;
  http://www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/unlucky.html
  You’d think sky diving wasn’t that dangerous.

For more information on cat see this article