Like the OP said, folks really aren't understanding the scale of this problem.. If they manage to do a single crate per minute, that's still just under seven days to do them all.

An empty forty foot shipping container on its own weighs about four tons and their max supported weight is 33.5 tons, so the problem is somewhere in between for every single container. A Mi-26 helicopter, a "heavy transport helicopter" can only lift 14.5 tons, so there will be crates that can't be lifted.

Even if it was possible, and ignoring the logistical issues, you can't ignore the safety issues. Doing it quickly across seven days is going to lead to human and equipment failure, and somebody's bound to get hurt or killed. Considering how many eyes are on this right now, what do you think is going to happen the first time someone dies?

And one per minute is wildly optimistic. I guess it would be more like 20 minutes per container, which will result in a year of offloading 24/7, which is also impossible due to low resource time of helicopter engines and airframe in general (and pilot stress too).

From my experience working with helicopters in the military, I think that is wildly optimistic. Probably closer to 60-240 minutes to get each container even 100m by helicopter, with severe limits to parallel operations either in the air, or on the ground/water nearby.

Yeah, and it sounds like they can't fly that long without parts failure. It's hard to find thorough information on how long heavy lift helicopters can run for, but a new CH-54K only has an 88.6% reliability rate for missions lasting only 2.25 hours. Shit's looking bad for the helicopter idea.

  However, the current estimate for mission reliability is still below the required threshold (i.e., minimally acceptable) requirement. The program office reported in November 2020 that the helicopter demonstrated an 84.5 percent reliability rate, which is short of the program’s threshold requirement and below where the program office expected the reliability to be at this point in development.15 The program office projects that the helicopter should reach mission reliability of 88.6 percent after operational testing.16 According to program officials, the main causes of the reliability shortfalls have been technical issues identified during developmental testing. For example, the reliability of the main gearbox has been one of the main factors affecting the helicopter’s overall mission reliability metric.17 As mentioned, the program office has mitigation plans in place to address many of those technical issues, but has not yet demonstrated the required level of overall helicopter mission reliability.

Source: https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-208.pdf (p13/14)

Uh, that's worse than I expected. The Egyptian Air Force has some Mil Mi-6, but their max slung load seems to be 8 tons according to Wikipedia.

Just use 4 helicopters per container.

> Considering how many eyes are on this right now, what do you think is going to happen the first time someone dies?

Considering how many goods and how much money is being blocked up by this the response may be loud from come parties but I doubt governments will care enough to stop it.

Some estimates I saw put the estimate at 10 billion dollars of goods being held up by the jammed ship and the costs of delays caused by sailing around the Cape instead will probably put a multiple on to that number before this is all over. There are construction projects in that corner of the globe worth far less that kill far more than just a few people but that hasn't really slowed them down much has it?

From a system design perspective, it's kind of nuts that the entire planet has only one single canal connecting two major bodies of water, and it's in a country with a, shall we say, precarious government. Surely such a single point of failure is a massive risk. Granted, geography doesn't leave us many choices, but could we at least build another, parallel canal to it?

There is another alternative: going around the southern tip of Africa. While this adds a couple weeks to trip time it also saves the massive Suez Canal transit tolls.

And remember the Suez Canal was closed for 8 years after the 1967 Israel/Egypt war. https://thegamming.org/2014/08/31/how-the-closure-of-the-sue...

Yeah and I'm under the impression that the fees are balanced so that it costs roughly the same amount to take either route. Ships only choose Suez because it's faster.

The Suez is at basically the one point it makes sense to build it. The next closest is off the Gulf of Aqaba and that's right on the border of Egypt and Israel. It really doesn't make sense for Egypt to go through the trouble of cutting a second one on the one in a million shot a ship gets stuck like this. The usual answer is just make sure they don't get stuck rather than spend the billions of dollars cutting a second canal would cost. Even if Egypt was somehow charged the losses for this screw up that probably wouldn't be enough to make it worth cutting a second backup canal.

There are actually 3 separate single-points-of-failure when you ship around the world.

Suez Canal

Panama Canal

Straight of Gibraltar- I think

When it was built, the notion that the land around it wouldn't be a colonial possession seemed unlikely.

The difference would be in the hyper-visibility of the deaths.

To show what I mean, compare the level of reporting and political backlash from [1], involving two construction workers against [2], involving 11 other deaths, that were only revealed after an audit. Visibility matters. I don't think it's unfair to say that if any deaths happen here that there would be far more global visibility than [1].

And besides, it's a silly armchair idea that doesn't make any sense whatsoever after ten minutes of scrutiny.

[1] https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/news/rio-cycle-path... [2] https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/news/rio-olympic-de...

As for the weight per container issue, I would expect the heavier container to be further down in the stack, for centre of gravity considerations, e.g. you should still be able to get a significant part of the load off the ship.

The objective is to lighten the ship. Moving the light containers isn’t optimal.

Sure, but removing two light containers is easier and more useful than failing to remove one heavy one.

This also assumes good weather. Part of what caused the ship to run aground was high winds. I imagine that any winds high enough to cause that would also make it impossible to use the helicopters. How often are the winds in that area that high in that area?

If you can get 10% of the weight down in a week, that is still better than not having the 10% gone. If you can do the helicopter offloading without blocking any other progress, then why not do it immediately?

Have a look at my other post in a sister thread.. the reliability of heavy lift helicopters is... garbage.

Sounds like efforts are going into offloading fuel and water tanks while they continue to dig up sand.

In an optimal attack on the problem I think you would be doing all of these; water, fuel and cargo would all be unloaded simultaneously.

Losing a few percent of weight in cargo is worth it.

But in real life these things aren't optimal ;)

The people that freed the ship yesterday were apparently not bad at all at estimating scale.

"For moving containers off the best bet would probably be heavy lift choppers, the ship is large enough you could have several working on it at once a"

I thought about this. I don't think a chopper can lift the container. Depending on the size of the containers, even the biggest chopper might not be enough https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-mi-26-helicopter-llft...

Get the ship moving again, I think if you pull too hard, it may fall apart. There is no infrastructure to unload it.

Gut feeling: Mount a crane on a ship and start unloading it to a smaller ship.

There's the crane lifting a crane lifting a crane method. [0]

Though I suspect another problem would be getting another ship large enough for all those cranes and strong enough to support all the weight close enough to the ship without them damaging each other by knocking into each other from waves and weight movement.

I also forgot about the matter of transporting those giant cranes onto the site. That itself would probably take weeks.

[0]https://www.constructionjunkie.com/blog/2015/8/9/watch-a-con...

"Though I suspect another problem would be getting another ship large enough for all those cranes and strong enough to support all the weight close enough to the ship without them damaging each other by knocking into each other from waves and weight movement."

I don't thinks this is your concern. Desperate times, desperate measures. Likely you would fix/attach the crane ship to the container ship. I am sure they are willing to salvage two ships at this time. The daily losses must be gigantic.

I'm definitely curious to see what they end up using. If the solution ends up involving choppers, there's obviously the question of tensile load specs for all the involved parts (the chopper itself, the cables, the containers, wind considerations, etc). I don't imagine they would have enough equipment with sufficiently large specs just laying around in case of an emergency like this, especially on such a large scale (recall we're talking about airlifting truck-sized loads, possibly numbering in the hundreds or even thousands), and it's not clear to me what kinds of forces the choppers are designed to withstand, especially if we consider lateral forces due to wind or container geometry or whatever.

I mean the boat is located 90 minutes from Cairo. It’s not easy but Cairo has skyscrapers and a construction industry.

Of course there is the “what is physically possible” and “what is politically doable” and there maybe a bit of a gulf there.

I think there's a canal there, actually.

There once was a canal there...now Evergreen Gulf. Or Gulf of Evergreen perhaps.

I mean, heavy-lifting choppers are something that I'd also expect the average NATO or (former) Warsaw Pact nation to have, and it's arguably in their best interests to make sure a key shipping route is operational (and in Egypt's best interests to accept any help possible).

Hell, Israel's close by, and I'm pretty sure they've got this sort of airpower in droves and are probably pretty heavily reliant on the Suez Canal; maybe instead of fighting with Egypt the Israelis could, say, pitch in and foster some good will? And further, it'll make up for the time when fighting between the two countries caused a Suez Canal blockage ;)

I am afraid you underestimate the weight of those TEUs and overestimate the capabilities of the Sikorsky CH-53 (which is what Israel has). That chopper has a max payload of 32000 lbs and a 40ft TEU has a max gross weight of 67500 lbs. Maybe you get lucky... but you'd need a lot of luck.

Also, if they find this is feasible, you don't necessarily need Israel to get a few Sikorsky choppers there, at least the Incirlik air base must have some and the Sikorsky definitely has the operational range to cross over there on its own, Iran certainly has some, the Eisenhower last I checked a few weeks ago was near Italy and surely that group has at least a few Sea Dragons...

> That chopper has a max payload of 32000 lbs and a 40ft TEU has a max gross weight of 67500 lbs. Maybe you get lucky... but you'd need a lot of luck.

1. This assumes that the containers are actually loaded to their maximum gross weight. That doesn't seem likely; you're much more likely to run out of volume first - even if you're deliberately "optimizing" for as much weight in those containers as possible.

1a. This assumes that the heavy containers are at the top rather than the bottom, which would be backwards from how containers are supposed to be stacked (or even allowed to be stacked per your average safety guidelines around center of mass, stack limits, etc.).

2. This assumes that multiple helicopters can't work in tandem (which they can, from what I understand).

So yeah, even if there are some containers that are too heavy to safely unload via helicopter, I strongly suspect that quite a few - most, probably - of those containers could be readily unloaded. And further, even if that ain't enough to get the ship moving again, it's at least a good start.

> the Eisenhower last I checked a few weeks ago was near Italy and surely that group has at least a few Sea Dragons...

Even better.

> 2. This assumes that multiple helicopters can't work in tandem (which they can, from what I understand).

Do you mean two helicopters carrying a single slung load? That is not practised anywhere.

Tandem loads in military terms refer to a single helicopter carrying two slung loads, one in front of the other.

As far as I know, none of the helicopters mentioned above are rated for sling operations with 40ft containers.

> As far as I know, none of the helicopters mentioned above are rated for sling operations with 40ft containers.

There was a sea basing study and that only looked at 20ft containers and dismissed even a theoretical upgraded CH-53X (although of course the study was looking at much longer range than just lifting it and putting it back down) but again, that was just 20ft, these 40ft ones are just too heavy for choppers.

A writeup https://www.aerotime.aero/27542-Could-helicopters-solve-the-... if anything, the Royal Jordanian Air Force operates two Mi-26s but

> For many containers, using helicopters would probably mean at least partially unloading their cargo, which is a difficult and time-consuming endeavor. The process of removing containers by helicopters would be even more difficult, dangerous, and time-consuming, so it is very, very unlikely we will see it implemented unless the situation gets really desperate.

TEU means Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit and is a measure of container capacity. A 40-foot container is 2 TEUs.

I mean, physical existence of a chopper vs its viability for this specific operation are very different things. Think of it this way: you may have a car, and you may even be familiar with installing and maneuvering a standard size tow. But that doesn't mean that I can just ask you out of the blue to come over and tow a prefab house that you've never handled before, then ask you to do it again a dozen times over (and on the double), and expect everything to go peachy.

Right, but in this context we're talking about countries with helicopters specifically intended to haul heavy things like shipping containers (and tanks, and trucks, and military base prefabs, and stuff). Keeping the analogy, it's like if you bought a Ford F-650 and your neighbors need help pulling some broken down semi (that's blocking the whole road) off the street in front of their house. And maybe you and your neighbor ain't on the best of terms, but you decide to at least offer to help anyway, because you need to use that street, too, and what was the point of buying that big pickup truck if you ain't gonna do truck stuff?

In this case, you're Israel, your neighbor's Egypt, the street is the Suez Canal, the semi is a giant container ship, and your F-650 is about 23 CH-53-derived heavy-lifting helicopters.

But do they actually routinely haul shipping containers packed to the brim? And continuously for days on end? There are various people in this thread saying that they can't, either because the specs are not up to par or because the stress risks rapid/early mechanical failure.

Also, while we're at it w/ terrible analogies, consider that many people (including the CEO of the company that got called to clean up this mess) are saying this is going to take weeks. The more accurate analogy is that your F-650 is a dozen tugboats, the truck is not blocking the road, but instead sunk in a marsh an hour away from town (the suez sand bank), loaded w/ 10,000 50lb lead anvils (the containers) and all the manpower you are able to summon in order to move those anvils are a dozen highly paid software engineers (the choppers) who may or may not be inclined to take a week off to help you move the anvils off the truck, and who may or may not be actually physically capable of helping even if they wanted to spend their week hauling hundreds of 50lb anvils by hand. Oh, and you can't just drop anvils in the marsh either, even by accident, due to the risk of poisoning the water supply for the town. And you can't rule out the risk of one of the software engineers tripping and drowning. And you're not even sure your F-650 can pull the truck out without tumbling it on its side or yanking off the front axle even if you empty it out completely.

Average expected teu is 30k lbs on a ship. A 20ft container is already close to the redline of these helicopters on the average. You cant max these vehicles for more than an hour or so without needing repairs. A 40ft container cant even be considered. Nearly all containers are packed to the brim to ink out max goods shipped. The whole chopper idea is just a movie fantasy for this. Real life is not pleasant to armchair theory.

> Average expected teu is 30k lbs on a ship

Yeah, average. That doesn't mean that every container - or even most containers - are loaded to that weight per TEU. Indeed, it's highly likely that they're not; the heavy containers are going to be toward the bottom, and the lighter containers are going to be toward the top. And there are probably a lot more light containers than heavy ones, because...

> Nearly all containers are packed to the brim

Volumetrically, yes. Not necessarily in terms of weight. Indeed, unless you're shipping gold ingots or something, "max goods shipped" necessarily means that you're more likely to run into volumetric limits first.

Not to mention that the max container weight in practice is usually a fair bit lower than the ISO spec, since those containers have to get to their destination - which means traveling on roads and railways with their own weight limits (both for the whole vehicle and per-axle), and on vehicles that themselves are part of that limit (and themselves have limits of their own). And further, a container can only have so much weight stacked on top of it.

> Real life is not pleasant to armchair theory.

Indeed it is not, which is why when it comes to the containers themselves I'm speaking from experience as a professional in the supply chain / logistics field :)

(But yes, admittedly my knowledge on military helicopters is less substantial, so if there's someone who's not an armchair theorist on that topic who wants to chime in, that'd be most welcome)

FYI, it is in fact not necessary to start a comment with "I mean".

I mean, regardless of necessity it ain't like it hinders parsing of the comment, FYI.

Nor “FYI”.

I suspect something more like they drop the containers in the desert. The value of the goods is irrelevant in the face of cutting off Europe from Asia.

It seems that containers may be too heavy. The most powerful chopper (the M-26) lifts up to 20,000kg (with most heavy-lift choppers probably lifting about half that), while some containers may wel exceed 30,000kg.

Wikipedia says: As of 2016, the Mi-26 still holds the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale world record for the greatest mass lifted by a helicopter to 2,000 metres (6,562 ft) – 56,768.8 kilograms (125,000 lb) on a flight in 1982.

That is 56.8 to 62.5 tons, depending on the type of ton. Lift two containers at once.

Making things even easier, the shipping company knows the position and weight of every container. The containers have been carefully placed, keeping the weight low and spread evenly. The containers on top are the low-weight ones.

Two paragraphs earlier, Wikipedia states "the Mi-26 has a payload of up to 20 tonnes (44,000 lb)". Exceeding the documented maximum payload by almost a factor of 3 sounds like an excessive amount of overengineering, even by software standards. :-)

You're right that most of the heaviest containers would be at the bottom of the stack. That's kind of a mixed blessing though..

That's at the max takeoff weight (56,000kg), including the weight of the helicopter, fuel, crew, etc.

Depending on the temperature as the site, that could be a lot lower.

Ha, in the late 90s/early 00s, there was some buzz in Germany about building a huge freight airship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter

They went bankrupt, which is kinda sad. It had a designed lift capacity of 160t, so could theoretically lift several containers at once, given the right harness.

(Of course I have no idea if it would be have been practical to use it to unload the containers, but the idea is certainly intriguing).

The fundamental problem/flaw with that was when dropping off something you needed to somehow get a dummy load to not float away. (releasing the helium is not an option due to economical reasons)

Have you ever tried to stack containers before? Or had to airlift something via tow on a helicopter? You can do the latter (I watched it happen in the military), but the former isn’t happening from a helicopter, not into a floating barge anyway.

There's no shortage of nearby desert not being used for anything else.

But the final goal is to put the containers back on the ship after it gets unstuck, no? I imagine the point of the containers being on the ship in the first place is that there are not enough trucks on land to get the containers off the desert to their destinations.

Right now the goal is to unblock the canal; if the entire cargo were lost in the process, that would be expensive, but I'm not confident it'd be more expensive than blocking shipping through for an extra fortnight.

@nerfhammer: Great idea, littering the canal with sharp debris pieces so the next ships will be torn to shreds :)

Dredging is the easy part. Not sure how much swimming happens in the canal. We only have to worry about cutting through steel, not skin.

Ships traveling at 7 knots over a minefield of sunken containers will happily shred their steel skin.

It sounded like they were intended to drop them on land, where one would hope no ships would be hitting them. 'Lost' would be referring to the likely chance that once put on the desert they wouldn't be retrieved.

it follows then that we should consider blowing up the ship

I suspect that might very well be on the table.

Hell, a big enough explosion might prevent ships from ever getting stuck at that spot again.

And you could recoup the costs by selling tickets to watch the explosion.

Ideally, but the value of whatever cargo is on the ship is worth less than a functioning global supply chain.

How the insurance would be settled would be interesting, I suppose it'd be the same as though the cargo was blown overboard.

The ship isn't floating though, that's the problem. But I'd imagine it's very stable when trying to lift stuff of due to it being stuck.

Yep. Throw a bunch of these and a bunch of fossil fuels at the problem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_S-64_Skycrane

There are comments further down explaining how the containers likely weigh substantially more than the lift capacity of heavy lift helicopters. They'd have to partially unload the contents of each individual container first.

And if you're unloading, the human labor cost to unload the whole container is probably cheaper than the cost of running a fleet of helicopters for weeks to months.

The Skycrane helicopter that OP referred to is a true beast. It can lift heavy tanks and intact electricity towers. I won't be surprised if it gets used to lift the containers one-by-one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDQrUiCd61U

That is nowhere close to the biggest. Check out the Mi-26:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW_IxNLNvrY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mil_Mi-26

Even that is not enough. It can lift 20 tons, and the 40 foot containers on this ship are heavier than that.

Wow, the Chinook looks so tiny in comparison to the Mi-26.

40ft container maximum weight is 67,200 lbs. Skycrane max payload is 20,000 lbs and Mi-26 is 44,000 lbs. But do you think all the containers are at max weight? The ones on top are the lightest and the helicopters might be able to help with them after all, or maybe we can find a way to use two helicopters per container.

http://containertech.com/about-containers/40-standard-vs-40-...

> or maybe we can find a way to use two helicopters per container

Spoken like a true programmer :) That's incredibly difficult and dangerous.

Lol, Can we compose the helicopters?

Split it into many micro-helicopters, each deployed and scaled independently?

I'm picturing a fleet of a few thousand hobbyist drones.

It would sound like a massive angry swarm of bees.

And their batteries would all run out at once and we get the biggest non-nuclear 'splash' in history.

Can be heavier than that most won't be the max gross tonage. The biggest hurdle might be knowing which ones they can pick though. In not sure if the shipping company keeps the weights of every container on file somewhere.

It can lift at least 56.8 to 62.5 tons, depending on your definition of tons. The heavy containers have been placed on the bottom of the ship for better stability, leaving the lightest ones on top.

28 tons of that is the helicopter itself though i think?

Or just blowing it up and push the pieces to the sides I would guess...

I like the way you think.

I'd buy a plane ticket to Suez to see that. Or even pay for a proper 4k stream of the event.

Build a pyramid on top and let scavengers do their thing

I like this scavengers idea. How far is it to Cairo, and what's unemployment like after Corona killed the tourism industy? Unlock all the containers, tell people you're paying them fifteen bucks an hour to come unload, AND they get to keep whatever they can carry off. How many people can you fit on that ship at once?

The containers are typically rated for no more than 40,000 lbs each. Skycrane can lift 20,000, so you'd use two per.

Or three per. Use a triangular spreader/yoke to keep them from having to pull laterally against (away from) each other. Single pivot point in the middle from which the load is suspended, allowing for imperfect coordination during hovering & movement. (The spreader can tilt or rotate.) Let a crawler crane and crew on the bank handle stacking/arrangement. Each container is lifted a second time into its temporary desert resting place. Has never been done before, just like space flight once. Would cost a lot and be dangerous, just like the military-industrial complex. Won't go perfectly, just like everything ever. Is inefficient, similar to but less so than losing the Suez Canal. Would take a long time, so start now. Really want to sarcastically thank all the naysayers and downvoters for policing all the dangerous creativity going on in this helicopter subthread. We must be more careful, especially considering how closely the shipping industry watches the Hacker News comments for ideas!

Yeah, i don't belive two pwe container is nearly enough. 3 or even 5 is a better idea smh, but you likely need 3 or 5 exceptionnal pilot who don't care if they die for science (and internationnal commerce).