https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/equipment/arrow-speed-loss-in-flight Changes to this claim in Matteo Campagna's evidence registry: its status, its year-by-year history, revisions of the page. en-gb https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/equipment/arrow-speed-loss-in-flightThe loss has been measured since 2007 in several independent laboratories, by different methods, and they all find the same thing: the arrow slows steadily under air resistance, and how much it slows depends on the arrow. The first to measure it work it out from the whistle of the point, through the Doppler effect, and find that untrimmed feathers produce about three times the drag of parabolic ones. An electronic point on a compound arrow records the drop from about 82 to 78.2 metres per second over fourteen metres; a chronograph moved out to ninety metres follows three compound arrows along the whole field; twenty-five shots by a shooting machine at seven distances between 27 and 82 metres give a decay rate of 2.31 thousandths per metre for an arrow launched at 74.5 metres per second; an inertial sensor inside the shaft measures about 8 per cent lost over 55 metres indoors, and the same authors note that over a seventy metre field the loss is around 15 per cent. With wooden bows and wooden arrows between 2 and 5 per cent of the speed goes in the first five metres, more with the more powerful bow, and in the model fitted to shots from a replica Apache bow a 9.7 gram cane arrow halves its energy within fifteen metres. Within a single flight the slowing changes pace, because the deceleration drops from 0.65 to 0.30 G when the layer of air around the shaft turns laminar again, and it changes with the point and with the fletching. On the Olympic recurve shot by an archer there is a single measurement, on one archer on a sixty metre indoor range, and it gives the drag coefficient but not the speed lost; the other data come from compounds, shooting machines, traditional bows and compressed-air launchers.claim:perdita-velocita-in-volo:revision:2026-08-17:2Mon, 17 Aug 2026 08:00:00 GMT https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/equipment/arrow-speed-loss-in-flightclaim:perdita-velocita-in-volo:new_claim:2026-07-09:corroboratoThu, 09 Jul 2026 08:00:00 GMT