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Comment by chaps | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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?

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...

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.

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

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

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.

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