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Dumb question but what about heavy lift helicopters moving containers off 1 by 1?
by leesec 6y ago
Dumb question but what about heavy lift helicopters moving containers off 1 by 1?
- BrianOnHN 6y agoIt's a lot of containers.
- leesec 6y agoYou don't need to remove all of them? Just get it light enough to float it?
- BrianOnHN 6y agoHelicopters also have limited capacity. So it's not like you could pick up the heaviest first. Which brings back the issue of sheer quantity.
- PeterisP 6y agoRemoving 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.
- londons_explore 6y agoit'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...
- yongjik 6y agoYou'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.
- totalZero 6y agoYou're assuming that the helicopters approach simultaneously instead of staggering themselves out.
- dghlsakjg 6y agoThe 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.
- zokier 6y agoMi-26 has record of 56 tons lifted: https://www.fai.org/record/2174 https://www.fai.org/record/2174 Although I suspect you don't want to repeat that trick too many times without serious inspection/maintenance.
- sudosysgen 6y agoThe Mi-26 is still in production, so you could replace them with brand new ones outright.
- orwin 6y agoWell, 56 tons in cold Russia is not AT ALL the same thing as 56 tons in Egypt. Maybe if you wait for winter?
- spookthesunset 6y agoA quarter of a mile long is a huge ship. Damn. Never really got that until now.
- cozzyd 6y agodocker-compose down ?
- gizmo385 6y agoBased 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.
- ceejayoz 6y agoIf it's fully loaded, that'd be something like ten thousand 40' containers to move. Hooking them up to a helicopter would be a slow, dangerous process as well.
- 6nf 6y agoThe biggest choppers in the world can only lift about 20 tonnes. 20 foot containers max gross is 25 tonnes, and 40 foot containers even more.
- gm3dmo 6y agoTypically 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.
- blhack 6y agoWhy would these containers be empty?
- eCa 6y agoYes, 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. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26574077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26574077
- rjsw 6y agoThey might be empty if it had been going the other way through the canal.
- blhack 6y agoThere 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.)
- gizmo385 6y agoYou'd also need a helicopter than can lift containers that heavy, which might be a long shot.
- jeffgreco 6y agoHow many copters are you assuming?
- kergonath 6y agoWe 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.
- bkor 6y agoJust 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.
- Alupis 6y ago
- WJW 6y agoMost 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.
- michaelt 6y agoIt 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.
- KptMarchewa 6y agoWhy is everyone assuming that we can do only one container at once? The ship is long, at least few can be done in parallel.
- michaelt 6y agoOutside 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?
- faldstool 6y agoContainers are apparently quite heavy. No helicopter currently in production can lift the weight of a fully loaded container on its own. https://www.aerotime.aero/27542-Could-helicopters-solve-the-Suez-channel-blockage https://www.aerotime.aero/27542-Could-helicopters-solve-the-...