There are 20,000 containers on the ship. Assuming you needed to remove 1/4 of those containers to get it to rise far enough to get off of the sand, you need to move 5000 containers.
Assume that it takes 5 minute to connect a bridle to a container, hook it to a helicopter, and move it...and then also assume that the helicopters can run 24/7 and never have to refuel, that they can hot swap in pilots, and that there is never a single problem, you're talking about 25000 minutes, or about 17 days of absolutely non stop running helicopters.
And that only gets you 1/4 of the containers, and it might not even work at all.
(It's not a dumb question, and I'm sure that it was already discussed by the team who is dealing with this. It's just that the scale of what is happening here is restrictive.)
Just a small correction: 20.000 TEU is not the same as the amount of containers. TEU is the number of twenty foot equivalent. There will be enough 40 foot containers on there. If it was going to Europe there will hardly be any empty containers.
Amount of actual containers is probably the 20.000 divided by 1.6 or so, though it's not a given that any vessel is fully loaded to max capacity. Sometimes need to deal with restrictions.
We really are bad at dealing with large numbers. 20 000 does not seem that much when it’s just written that way. Even looking at the pictures, this is a lot of containers, but the efforts needed to get them out of that ship are hard to imagine.
It appears to be roughly 7 x 20 x 25 containers, or 3500... (height x width x length.)
EDIT: Freezing this video I got a better view of how it's stacked today. I'm sure this is imperfect, like I said trying to count candy in a jar. But I'm curious what the real number of containers is!
Your height number is off by a factor of 2; a significant factor of container storage on these large container ships is below the deck. It isn't uncommon for these large ships to have 9 to 12 containers stacked on top of eachother before the stack reaches above the deck and becomes visible from the side.
Most heavy lift helicopters don't really go above 20 tons takeoff weight, while even a 20 foot container has a max allowable weight well above that. Most shipping containers will the 40 footers, so helicopters will probably be a no-go. There's also 20k of them so it would take quite a while.
That said, taking off some containers is a viable option but it'll probably have to wait for a crane ship to arrive.
Typically an empty 20 foot shipping container weighs between 1.8-2.2 metric tonnes (about 3,970 - 4,850 lb) and an empty 40 foot shipping container weighs 3.8 - 4.2 tonne (8,340 - 9,260 lb) depending on what kind of container it is. For example, high cube containers tend to be heavier.
Yes, especially with the container shortage[1] reported earlier this week, I would be very surprised if empty containers are being sent away from where there already is a shortage.
Based on the information on Wikipedia, it sounds like the ship could potentially hold more than 20,000 containers. Assuming I'm understanding the article correctly, that'd be a lot of containers to move 1-by-1.
It has 20,000 TEUs (twenty-foot-container-equivalent-units).
Weight-wise, the average container could be lifted with a military heavy lift helicopter: The ship carries 20,000 tons, i.e. 1 ton per TEU, and a CH-47F can lift 11 tons. Although a TEU can weigh up to 26 tons, so you couldn't lift the heaviest ones.
The problem is speed: A ship-to-shore crane at a properly equipped port can do a lift every 2 minutes. Ports can speed things up by lifting several TEUs in a single lift - but you'd also expect a helicopter to be slower, because we haven't put decades of optimisation into the process. So let's assume those cancel each other out.
If they can keep up that rate with a helicopter, and they operate 24 hours a day, it would take 28 days to unload the ship.
Outside of Vietnam war movies, it's very unusual to see helicopters flying in close proximity.
I suppose it's possible you could find a bunch of pilots confident in cargo handling, landing on ships, and close formation flight all at once. Or that the ship is large enough the helicopters would practically be independent of one another?
Removing 10% of containers by helicopter also would take unreasonable time, removing 1% of containers might be plausible but I don't think it would make enough of a difference to justify the risks.
it's a quarter mile long. You can probably have 10 helicopters working at once while still keeping safe distances.
Each helicopter has a crew of 4 on the boat and 4 on the shore. They hook 4 chains to the 4 corner hoists of each container. Say it takes 1 minutes per container to affix the chains, 1 minute to fly to the sand, 1 minute to unhitch, and 1 minute to fly back. Thats a lot slower than agricultural helicopters, but nobody will be very practiced with this yet, so it'll be slower.
The entire ship could be unloaded with this method in 5.5 days. Perhaps less if not all the cargo needs unloading.
You're joking, right? It's a quarter mile, or 400m long. Ten helicopters in it means ~40m distance. That's less than safe distance between cars in a highway.
The worlds highest capacity heavy lift chopper (M-26, of which there are 20 operational) has a max take off weight of 44k lbs. A standard 40 ft. container can be loaded to a gross weight of 66k lbs.
It takes a purpose built crane a few minutes to unload a container, so I sort of doubt a helicopter could make it happen faster.
Coincidentally a quarter of a mile (400m) is also the length of those oval tracks around soccer fields in Europe. we used to run on them a lot in PE back in high school.
