Please click on

It's also based on a real event:
http://radio.about.com/od/thanksgivingradio/qt/WKRP-Turkey-Drop-Video-Audio.htm

My understanding is that wild turkeys would have essentially been able to make a controlled landing, but they can't fly a great distance.

Here's a turkey drop from Yellville, Arkansas
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b17_1318005039

I think he expected the birds to land in a kind of controlled glide.

Well, we all know that Mr. Carlson and Herb aren't too bright.

Of course the question is, if Carlson had been right, what good would the promotion have been anyway? The "giveaway" turkeys would all fly away and no one would get one.

The first answer from hariseldon59 is pretty much spot on. In fact the commercially grown Thanksgiving birds are so breast-heavy that they can barely walk around normally by the time they're ready for harvest. I once read that the fortunate national bird that gets pardoned each year by the US president is sent to a kind of petting zoo to live out its life which is typically only a few weeks anyway. Both the ceremonial turkey and the reserve bird that is brought along to the White House in case the first one drops dead before the ceremony are quite close to their full life expectancy by the holiday.
These animals are like Franken-birds that scarcely resemble real wild turkeys like Arthur Carlson would have assumed. It still would have been a dopey idea to toss those out of a chopper though. So, in short,
turkeys really can fly
, but
Thanksgiving turkeys
are a bit of a science project on legs that have been retarded from flight to keep their white meat 'white' and artificially generous in proportion.
Here's the science if you need it:
https://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/meat/INT-what-meat-color.html
Eeek!!! I'm getting dressed.

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"Oh, the humanity!"!

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Best line EVER in any TV show to date!

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Best holiday episode ever

I mentioned to a coworker that I may not be able to wait until Thursday to watch this episode would you believe there are people who have NEVER seen it?

It's just like Mr. Carlson said: Herb bought defective turkeys.
Funniest episode ever on TV.

Not exactly. The station that inspired the turkey drop threw out live turkeys from the back of a semi trailer in a shopping center parking lot. WQXI in Atlanta.

I remember hearing a report on a local station about this actually happening, a year or so before the episode aired.
My understanding is that they checked with an ornithologist who told them that turkeys couldn't fly well, but they could fly a little. The problem was that he was talking about wild turkeys, and the station that did it used domesticated oneswhich fly about as well as bowling balls.

They can get off the ground but not very far. The rest is accurate.
I am naver wrong, I am not always correct but I am never wrong

And I doubt they could fly from a moving helicopter.

So they probably would simply plummet to the ground.
That's exactly what they didaccording to Les' commentary "They're plopping to the ground like wet cement!" One also went through the windshield of a parked car
Oh stewardessI speak jive.

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The word is "bred" not "bread" for krysakes.
"I will not go down in history as the greatest mass-murderer since Adolf Hitler!" - Merkin Muffley

Yes, and my point was that domesticated turkeys, bread to have larger breasts and limited flight abilities would have still fallen from that distance and gone splat.
I never said it was the same speed as frozen turkeys. I simply pointed out that live, thanksgiving turkeys dropped from a helicopter on to pavement would go splat.