Summary: An analysis of thermal and chemical nonequilibrium effects in near-wake ionizing flows is presented. The influence of real-gas effects on the establishment of scaling laws of the near-wake properties is analyzed, and a simplified model, which relies on an idealized flow solver still capable of accounting for dissociation and ionization effects, is developed. A study of the flows around sphere-cone and Apollo-like re-entry capsule bodies shows that the forebody nonequilibrium does affect the quantities that characterize the near-wake behavior (e.g., upstream influence, extent of recirculation, peak heating along the base). In addition, we show that real-gas effects can be recovered by means of an idealized-gas model that solves for the compressible Navier-Stokes equations and a transport equation for the specific-heat ratio \(\gamma\), supplemented with algebraic relations to determine the species mass fractions and vibrational temperature as a function of \(\gamma\).