Sylvester Levay and Stephan Prager wrote the song, and the latter produced it.

In the United States, it rose to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in November 1975, staying there for three weeks.

[6] In Canada, the song also reached the pole position in the charts, hitting number one in the RPM Top Singles Chart on 17 January 1976,[7] knocking the Bay City Rollers' "Saturday Night" from the top slot, managing to keep it for a single week before being replaced by C. W. McCall's "Convoy" a week later.

In April 2016, students and teachers from Methodist College, a Hong Kong secondary school, produced an educational "campus television" video by introducing four geometry methods in determining the congruence of triangles (SAS, SSS, ASA, AAS; Side-Angle-Side, Side-Side-Side, Angle-Side-Angle, Angle-Angle-Side), through a song playfully naming "RHS" (Right-angle-Hypotenuse-Side, the fifth evidence for proving congruent triangles) which lines to the tune of "Fly, Robin, Fly".

The clip has become a viral video which garnered over 800,000 views and over 50,000 "likes" on Facebook within a week, becoming one of the temporary hot topics in Hong Kong during late April, with various online parodies and social kusos provoked.