Originally Posted By: Pete
Dropping supplies off helo's is not a great solution because the looters and bandits wind up taking control of a lot of the stuff.

That's probably not the primary problem on the minds of people in charge. IMO it's probably more just safety concerns. In the cases where you're actually dropping supplies from a hovering helicopter (I've seen that happening with the Blackhawks) or even bigger parachute-assisted drops from a cargo plane, anyone on the ground is vulnerable to injury if something lands on them. If you're desperately thirsty or hungry, people are going to run towards anything they see being dropped, and probably will try to stand underneath and "catch" anything. Of course, killing people unintentionally by dropping a pallet of supplies on them is also very problematic so you have to try and stay away from any people.

Then there's the chance of injury or even violence in the mad scramble for supplies, regardless of whether we're talking about supplies being distributed from a helicopter, a truck, or even a building. That's why you need security to organize the people once you actually get supplies to some location.

I saw one helicopter distribution that seemed to be organized. The Airborne guys got to the clearing first and set up a perimeter, the chopper landed and unloaded the supplies without crowds swarming the aircraft, and then...well, actually, I forget if CNN showed the actual distribution part. Anyway, that seems like the way it should go, although the actual amount of supplies you can load on a Blackhawk are not all that much.