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What's your estimate on flight costs for helicopter versus C-130? Because I bet you could figure out a way to drop those things out the back of a cargo aircraft by the palletload and have 90%+ reach the ground intact; from eating MREs a few times, I don't remember them being very heavy for their volume, and the packaging is durable...
Maybe ditch the Humanitarian rations and just start dropping sacks of dry beans and rice with cut-rate parachutes? Like, really optimize for usable calories on the ground for the cheapest price possible, where harm to the payload is a minimal concern.
I think a literal palletload of MREs dropped out of a C130 has a pretty high chance of being an accidental kinetic weapon. Probably possible to do a bit better though.
Part of it, though, is that helicopters are just not that expensive in the grand scheme of things - I see $2400 / ton from the World Food Program for their program of doing very similar airdrops of food over South Sudan.
And yeah beans and rice are cheaper, but even if you cut the cost of the food itself to $0 you still need to ship about 1-1.5kg / person / day, which works out to 1M metric tons / year of food. At that point the cost of delivering the food by air is the strong limiting constraint.
Israel has already spent $30B on this war, so if getting costs down by 10x really is viable I am even more confused why they haven't done it, absent the obvious explanation of "they really are trying to put food pressure on Gaza".
I was thinking more hot-glue two packs to a stick and see if you can get them to airfoil like a maple-seed, or even just dump the packs out loose from, say, 200 feet up. I've never seen one of these packs, I'm going off handling MRE packs before, which were relatively light and packaged in very tough plastic.
My assumption is that Israel is absolutely trying to put food pressure on Gaza; I think there was a link in the international thread that 10% of the gazan population is now dead, and I would expect that number to increase significantly before this is over.
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Israel and friends did parachute pallets in late July/early August in coordination with the UAE and Jordan. Footage and image of a pallet. It was criticized for being a dangerous (probably untrue) and token (true) effort.
A big Berlin airlift that aims to feed everyone is doable if the US is supporting in a major way. Israel has maybe 15 Hercules. UAE/Jordan around the same between them. If everyone tries hard, and the US matches with airframes and maintenance support, you get 40 planes.
Running the numbers through the robot, bottleneck is space (only 6-8 pallets per flight) and available airframes. Somewhere between 200-400 flights to deliver one daily ration of ~2100 calories to 2 million mouths. The high numbers were when I tried to get a guesstimate on the GHF's 20kg 3-5 day rations. To get to the low end we need x5 sorties per day from our fleet of 40. If, however, you managed to fill the back of the plane with loose grains of rice until max load, you could cut that down to 60 flights. The robot tried really hard to convince me "you can’t pour loose grain in the cabin" because "loose bulk will shift during flight and create dangerous center-of-gravity," but I am not convinced.
Actually, I saw something about how dangerous it is for ships, I imagine it's similar issues for planes.
If this video is to be believed, such an incident (poorly secured cargo shifting on a plane) was responsible for a Tu-104 crashing and taking out 16 of the USSR Pacific Fleet's top admirals in a single shot.
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Unironically, you could probably also figure out a way to shoot them out of a canon. Or a literal trebuchet.
Wouldn't be the best way to do so, obviously, but if we're looking for cost-efficient airdrops, why not blimps and zepplins?
Maybe we could get steampunk zepplins after all.
yeah, I see the skepticism over cost as a challenge. 4.70 per ratpack x 2 ratpacks x 2,050,000 inhabitants = $18.8 million, so obviously the large majority of the cost estimate here is delivery. I'm pretty sure cargo planes have <10x the capacity of a helicopter with significantly lower costs per flight hour.
Greater (>10x), since you can pack a helicopter into the largest ones, and yes (mostly), but also not necessarily.
The larger issue is more the relative precision of drops. You can not only greatly increase the survival / receipt of food delivery when doing it via helicopter rather than plane, but you can also even manage a loose idea of who will receive it. Such as, say, a clan enclave that has defensible positions against a Hamas seizure/retaliation group, as opposed to airdropping into Israel or the Mediterranean. So you could absolutely carry X ration packages cheaper in the plane, but you'd also need to carry far more than X packages on Y planes to get the same effect.
High-air drops aren't really effective, and tend to assume you have relatively free mobility across the land area being dropped upon. There's a reason the Berlin Airbridge was overwhelmingly land-unloads while the airdrops were propaganda.
Just carpet-bomb the place -- make your $20M $200M and drop pallet loads of rice on chutes all over the place -- if people are literally getting machine gunned for food, they will figure it out if the odd bag breaks.
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