Atmonauti vs track

[Juzernejm 0]

I was just wondering, using which technique is a skydiver able to cover the biggest distance: the track or them atmonauti angles?

[jerry81 10]

A good hard track. Atmonauti is more about precise movement than maximizing the glide ratio.

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[rhys 0]

Quote

A good hard track. Atmonauti is more about precise movement than maximizing the glide ratio.

are you sure about that when gi explained it to me she decribed tracking as, stalled atmonauti. just like an aircraft with no engine has to increase the angle of incidence to keep the lift going otherwise it will stall.

i am not too sure though but that is how i took it.

any physicists out there?

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, then the world will see peace." - 'Jimi' Hendrix

[jerry81 10]

The angle of incidence on an airplane is the angle between the wing chord line and the longitudinal axis of the plane and doesn't really change on fixed-wing aircrafts.

A plane in slow flight would increase the pitch angle (angle between the longitudinal axis of the aircraft and the horizon) to increase the angle of attack (angle between the chord line and the relative wind hitting the wing) and get the same amount of lift a lower angle of attack would produce at a higher speed.

So...on to the human body, which isn't a very efficient airfoil to begin with. The direction of the relative wind is opposite to the direction of our flight, so the angle of attack will depend on the pitch of our body and our trajectory. The basic problem of calculations is that the human body, as mentioned, isn't much of an airfoil...the principles of aerodynamics still apply, but things such as airfoil shape and surface and airflow would be much harder to define with any acceptable level of precision. With the relative wind being equal (like on a trackmonauti dive), the angle of attack will be bigger in a tracking position than in atmonauti...yet the two can fly together. For 'normal' airfoils, the coefficient of lift increases with the angle of attack to some point and then drops off (stalling angle of attack). A bigger angle of attack, i.e. a track, would basically produce more lift (given it is below the stall AOA...which you can feel pretty well while tracking if you reach it), but the problem is we're not working with the same airfoil as in atmonauti. Describing tracking as 'stalled atmonauti' is therefore not 100% accurate (personally, that's the way I'd describe making a mistake that causes you to lose lift and drop out of an atmo formation).

To sum it as best as my current understanding of aerodynamics will allow; atmonauti=higher speed, higher pitch angle (from -10 to -45°, according to the webpage), lower angle of attack and tracking=lower speed, lower pitch angle (although I don't think 0° is the most efficient) and higher angle of attack. Different body positions/airfoils utilized. Both make you go forward and it is possible to synchronize the movement (the aforementioned trackmonauti dives), but given the difficulty of doing any precise calculations for the aerodynamics of the human body, it's a lot easier to rely on empirical observations. Having been on a few really advanced atmonauti dives, I'm pretty sure about my previous statement; "Atmonauti is more about precise movement than maximizing the glide ratio.". I suppose some testing would be required to determine just how more efficient a max track is compared to a 'max atmonauti position', yet the bottom line remains that atmonauti means diagonal relative work, not getting as far as possible. Hey look, I made up yet another name for it!

(And yeah, maybe some physicist who's actually played with human aerodynamics should chime in as well...I remember there was a thread about something similar not long ago.)

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