Hmmm...former skydiver here, not sure your point is accurate. I don't understand why increasing your forward momentum from tracking would decrease your fall rate.
I think your assumption that drag will slow you to 120mph is inaccurate - for example, if you fall heads-down your terminal velocity is instead up to ~180mph. Similarly, I'd expect that if you track in a direction your velocity could increase above 120mph while not lowering the speed at which you approach the ground.
Apologies - my physics knowledge and terminology is very limited, but do have some practical experience in the area :)
The trick is that while you can't actually decrease the total amount of energy in your fall, you can get some of that energy to work in your favour.
Think about when you flare a parachute, shortly before landing. What you're doing is trading forward momentum for vertical lift, softening your landing. The more forward momentum you have prior to a flare, the more lift you can get out of it. This is why you see experienced / foolhardy skydivers doing "hook turns" to maximise their forward velocity immediately before landing.
(Of course if you just stayed in the flare position continously, you'd have no forward momentum to trade, and would therefore lose lift entirely, producing the opposite of the intended effect.)
Anyhow, yeah, I doubt that tracking alone would help with survivability. My hunch is that you'd be trading 10mph of vertical momentum for about 40mph of horizontal momentum. Doesn't sound like a good trade. Although maybe -- just maybe -- you could execute a "body flare", whereby you kick your legs forward at exactly the right moment, to kill that forward momentum and trade it for lift. That might actually work (a bit)! But it sounds like an extraordinarily difficult manouevre. You'd certainly never get it right on the first try. Which of course is as many tries as you'll ever get.
You might have to spend your last 10 seconds or so in an orientation that maximizes drag, so as to take advantage of the horizontal velocity you've built up.
I'm familiar with the physics angle, but not the skydiving one. :-) I think to know this accurately we'd have to look at some kind of simulation.
I think your assumption that drag will slow you to 120mph is inaccurate - for example, if you fall heads-down your terminal velocity is instead up to ~180mph. Similarly, I'd expect that if you track in a direction your velocity could increase above 120mph while not lowering the speed at which you approach the ground.
Apologies - my physics knowledge and terminology is very limited, but do have some practical experience in the area :)