The choppers were bunched up as closely together as possible, many probably on their tail end of fuel as they'd be landed in order of least fuel remaining. Figuring all of that out in a under an hour without creating any risk to the civilians who were already everywhere in and between would have been nigh impossible.

I assume getting them ready to fly, crews, and etc was going to take a while to launch them all.

And they weren’t useful anymore. In a time of crisis, that would just complicate things. Better to simplify.

An aircraft carrier can't launch 5 helicopters in less than an hour?

Not if they're cramming them as close as they can go to make space. As soon as they pushed the first ones off, more landed.

> Immediately, five more airborne Huey pilots took advantage of the cleared runway to land and disembark their passengers.

Basically, the situation in the pic at https://www.forcesnews.com/news/uss-theodore-roosevelt-chang..., but with aircraft instead of cars.

They were all gonna wind up scrapped or sent to the boneyard (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_Navy_040204-N-312...) anyways.

To land where?

It was an emergency situation. The carrier was the only safe landing zone for hundreds, if not thousands, of miles.

The choppers had been flying at or above max capacity for long distance, and would have been low on fuel already. Fueling them on the flight deck would not only have taken more time but presented its own significant risk of fire particularly in the confusion and nonstandard ops environment.