The distance they jump/the speed at which they fall seems like it would be impossible to land without falling flat on your face. There is obviously some cool physics going on, but please.
In: Mathematics
Imagine you have a jetpack. You are flying vertical to the icy ground. You are wearing something to reduce friction even more. At that moment, it seems to you, like the ground isn’t moving closer to you. You are not falling. You could slowly fly lower and touch the ice. Glide on it. Or, the ground could slowly come up to you and touch you.
We have no problem with touching or landing on something that’s moving slowly towards us. And from that perspective with the jetpack, it would look and feel like you are slowly moving towards the ground.
So how do you achieve the same thing while ski jumping? You calculate the trajectory of a jump. And then you build the ground to go down at the same speed and height as the jumper. So imagine you jump, and if there was a cliff you would jump 100 meters. But now imagine someone builds a slope while you are jumping right under you, but not touching you. You will also fly 100 meters without touching the ground, but at every moment you are only centimeters away from the ground. It will look from your perspective like you are flying over the ground in a straight line. At any point you could put your feet down like you put your feet down from a stool.
And then you are just on a slope slowly stopping your fall, by getting slowly more and more horizontal.
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