Falling as fast as the air allows.

A falling body speeds up only until drag, which grows with the square of speed, catches up to gravity, which doesn't grow at all — from then on it falls at a constant rate, its terminal velocity. Because drag depends on frontal area A and drag coefficient C_d but weight depends on mass, two skydivers in the same position don't fall at the same speed if one is heavier — the opposite of the equal-acceleration result for a vacuum most people remember from school, where mass cancels out completely. A, C_d pairs here are representative, approximate values for an 80 kg reference skydiver, not measured constants; air density ρ = 1.225 kg/m³ is sea level. A real skydive starts thousands of metres up, where thinner air raises the terminal velocity further before thickening air near the ground brings it back down — this page shows the steady-state balance at one fixed density, not that descent.