Charmed mesons may be produced when a primary cosmic ray or the leading
hadron in an air shower collide with an atmospheric nucleon. At energies \ge
10^8 GeV their decay length becomes larger than 10 km, which implies that they
tend to interact in the air instead of decaying. We study the collisions of
long-lived charmed hadrons in the atmosphere. We show that (\Lambda_c,D)-proton
diffractive processes and partonic collisions of any q^2 where the charm quark
is an spectator have lower inelasticity than (p,\pi)-proton collisions. In
particular, we find that a D meson deposits in each interaction just around 55%
of the energy deposited by a pion. On the other hand, collisions involving the
valence c quark (its annihilation with a sea cbar quark in the target or
c-quark exchange in the t channel) may deposit most of D meson energy, but
their frequency is low (below 0.1% of inelastic interactions). As a
consequence, very energetic charmed hadrons may keep a significant fraction of
their initial energy after several hadronic interactions, reaching much deeper
in the atmosphere than pions or protons of similar energy.Comment: 13 pages, version to appear in PR