Do house flies fly in a certain pattern?

I have these small black flies that congregate on my carport, or any other dead air spaces. They dart back and forth, to and fro. They don’t gather where the dog poop is, so they’re not looking for that like regular straight flying flies.
These little beggers sometimes get in the house. I don’t think they follow me around, but they always seem to be in the same room where I am. Sometimes, in the evenings, I catch them at the windows and squirt them with a mixture of Dawn detergent and water.
It never fails. If I wait to the darkness of evening, turn off all of the lights in the house, then go into the bathroom, leave the door open and the bathroom light on, they’ll come in there. When they try to hide they find the dark shaded spots, like around the vanity, in the trash can, or under the toilet. I try to flush them out and force them to fly into the shower where they are limited in flight and I can liberally spay.

Apparently they do.

Flies explore their environment using a series of straight flight paths punctuated by rapid 90° body-saccades. Some of these manoeuvres avoid obstacles in their path. But many others seem to appear spontaneously. Are the spontaneous flight paths really random, do they serve any real purpose?

Armed with a computer video tracking system and an array of mathematical techniques the two researchers have revealed how the flight patterns of starved fruit flies constitute an optimal scale-free searching strategy – like the fractal patterns of a snowflake, a fly flight path appears similar whether viewed up close, or from a distance.

The researchers also found that searching is intermittent, such that flies actively search by making tight turns, and fly straight some distance to begin searching again. Scale-free movement patterns have been found in diverse animals including zooplankton, wandering albatrosses, jackals, and even human hunter-gathers. Intermittent searchers include octopi, graylings, and mating crickets.

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Fly Facts

Why do Houseflies circle around in the middle of the room?