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.
