Before you downvote, do the math.
Before you downvote, do the math.
A typical bulk carrier pays about $200,000 per transit.
51 ships transit the canal each day, on average.
Egypt is losing $10m per day.
Edit: the canal generated $5.85billion in revenue in 2018, or $16million per day.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-egypt-economy-suezcanal-i...
this seems excessive, if they made 400M in trade per hour that would be 3T per year, but Egypt's GDP is ~1T.
Being generous, you could move maybe 5 per hour. Probably 1 per hour would be realistic. But give them the benefit of the doubt and say they could move 20 per hour for some reason, including fuel and maintenance stops.
So assuming that they could work 24 hours per day, they could do 480 containers per day (again assuming that all of the containers are 22k lbs lighter than capacity). They should be able to get this helicopter unloading done in 20 days of around the clock work with a bunch of highly optimistic assumptions.
Plus they have to stay out of the way of the dozens of salvage workers trying to move the actual ship, while operating a soviet era machine in a VERY harsh desert environment with no infrastructure.
If they need the ship to float higher, they would start by removing ballast, fuel, crew water, etc.
Large salvage operations are notoriously expensive, tricky, dangerous, and often don't make sense to outsiders. There's a reason that there's really only about half a dozen firms worldwide that have the expertise and equipment to pull something like this off.
To all the ship owners and cargo owners, this blockage is a big problem and massive amounts of money should be spent to solve it.
But to the canal owners, they are only losing relatively small amounts of revenue by the canal being shut, so while they are sending all their boats to try pull it free, they aren't yet at the stage of calling in the army helicopters to help unload the ship.
At some point Egypts government will probably get involved, and then the army will show up with tanks with a lot of pulling power, massive winches installed on the shoreline, and helicopters for unloading.
The proper solution is probably (?? I'm not an engineer, just spitballing here) a system of pulleys. See Archemedies and The Syracusia: Archemedies allegedly moved a ship powered only with his own muscles using only a system of pulleys as an assist.
I realize that the Syracusia is probably smaller than this container ship in the canal. Still though: a system of pulleys is probably cheaper and stronger than what a team of Tanks would do.
-------------
They're at least in a situation where there's a ton of land nearby that can serve as an anchor point. I mean... the problem right now is probably just figuring out where and how to safely pull the ship. They need to apply hundreds-of-thousands of tons of force in a way that:
1. Won't break the ship apart
2. Successfully dislodges it
Its a relatively simple problem to apply hundreds-of-thousands of tons of force. But doing it in such a way to keep the ship floating... that's the hard part.
Also, you can't do the maneuvering they were trying to with the tugs at the same time you're doing something like that, unless you want to kill someone.
Unloading such a ship to empty would take a long time even if it's in port facilities under many cranes.
In comparison, unloaded shipping containers are already a few tons. Loaded ones are all over the place, of course, but max out at around 30.