My Great-Grandfather tried to teach his father’s bantam hens how to fly, so they could act as carrier pigeons. He would take them to the loft of the barn and give them a toss. All he succeeded in doing was teaching them how to be scared of him.
I have also seen flying chickens, including laying hens and roosters being raised for consumption.
I presume it has a great deal to do with how the chicken is raised (so to speak). I would doubt that a chicken raised from birth confined to a tiny box can fly. I bet a man strapped to a chair from birth couldn’t walk, either. But chickens are not kiwis. If they can’t fly, it is not because their wings are vestigial; it is because they are atrophied.
We always had chickens as kids. Most of them could fly up about 6 ft and maybe 20 ft distance max. We raised road island reds. The chicken I mentioned above was a very light weight rooster who was born and raised semi wild.
Yes those “feral” chickens all over the Caribbean are pretty damn good fliers, I mean they don’t soar like an eagle or anything but I have seen them easily do a 30 foot vertical flight from a standstill to roost in a tree at night.
I remember one of those ‘useless facts’ lists that said ‘the longest recorded flight of a chicken is 13 seconds’. FWIW.
Photographic evidence:
More:
Kind of gives whole new meaning to that old joke, doesn’t it? 
“Why? To get to the lane divider, of course!” 
Splat …
“With God as my witness, I thought chickens could fly.”
I’m still waiting for God to post his testimony here.
#43the chicken breed is Rhode Island Reds, not road island
RE: 32 Back a bit, about 75 years ago when my father was buying and selling eggs, he had source who kept the chickens in a room of the house. No one has mentioned so far WKRP where we learned that turkeys can’t fly, at least domestic ones, and not from heights.
My source reported something very similar about chickens. He said that the hen tucked its wings in and just dropped until it was close to the ground, then opened it’s wings for a controled landing. Unfortuanately, by that time it’s vertical velocity had increased beyond what it could handle, and it “exploded in a ball of feathers”
Most farmers would agree that chickens are for eating and eggs; dogs are a hobby.
When I was a kid, my stepdad had foxhounds and chickens (among many other things). If a young hound wanted to chase chickens, he got a couple of chances (after being yelled at or whipped) to change his ways. After that, it was the .22, a shovel and over the hill. Dogs can be bred not to chase chickens (just like good fox hounds are bred not to chase deer or rabbit), but you have to cull out the bad 'uns.
Cutting the flight feathers on one wing, not both, will keep the chickens in the fenced area.
Then, too, barnyard fowls usually have had their wings clipped. I wonder what would happen if the farmer didn’t do that–would the birds tend to fly away, or would some kind of flocking instinct tend to keep them where they are?
Recently I saw one of those “cute animal type” news tidbits about a pit bull who’d befriended several small animals that would ride around on the dog’s back, including some half-grown chickens. I couldn’t help but notice how the chickens were almost constantly flapping their wings as if trying to train themselves for flight.