You don't need to remove all of them? Just get it light enough to float it?

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.

Helicopters also have limited capacity. So it's not like you could pick up the heaviest first. Which brings back the issue of sheer quantity.

docker-compose down ?

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.

The job could be half done by now...

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.

You're assuming that the helicopters approach simultaneously instead of staggering themselves out.

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.

Mi-26 has record of 56 tons lifted: https://www.fai.org/record/2174

Although I suspect you don't want to repeat that trick too many times without serious inspection/maintenance.

Well, 56 tons in cold Russia is not AT ALL the same thing as 56 tons in Egypt. Maybe if you wait for winter?

The Mi-26 is still in production, so you could replace them with brand new ones outright.

A quarter of a mile long is a huge ship. Damn. Never really got that until now.

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.

Same in the US for the tracks surrounding football fields (and soccer fields too, for that matter).

It’s really tall as well. You can’t take any quickly assembled crane to unload that.

About the height of the empire state building

Or, depending on how quick it really is, it could take months. Its easy to arm-chair speculate.