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.
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.