BY: Bob Glenn, Editor and Publisher
The Vita Load Navigator (VLN) became available to lifting and rigging professionals several years ago, and we had first seen their product demonstrated at CONEXPO-CON/AGG in 2023. We thought it would be timely to get an update on how the industry has adopted this technology. Here we check in with Caleb Rosenberger from Vita Inclinata Technologies to learn more.
This article originally appeared in the May-June 2026 issue of Wire Rope Exchange. Read the entire issue at this link.
What Is the Vita Load Navigator?
Bob Glenn / Wire Rope Exchange: Give us a basic description of the Vita Load Navigator — what it is and what it does for someone who’s never seen one before.
Caleb Rosenberger / Vita Inclinata Technologies: The Vita Load Navigator (VLN) uses propulsion and torque, combined with a beam – which is the visible element on most of our standard products – along with onboard data sensors and control technology to manage the rotational behavior of a suspended load. Everything you’d traditionally use a tagline for, the VLN handles instead. That means the crew can step out of the danger zone, and in many cases you can raise your wind speed operating limits up to the crane manufacturer’s own rated cutoff.
WRE: So can you actually operate in conditions — and locations — that would be genuinely problematic for taglines?
Rosenberger: Yes. We can often keep a crew working at wind speeds that would otherwise be unsafe simply because the taglines themselves become a hazard in those conditions. And then there are situations where you physically can’t use a tagline at all, over a river, for example. I’ve had projects where utilizing a tagline was simply not an option, regardless of whether conditions were otherwise safe.
The Core Technology
WRE: What’s at the core of the system? What’s the key technology driving it?
Rosenberger: Vita has developed our own control system over the past decade, which analyzes over 1,000 data points per second. When the unit boots up on the ground, similar to a laptop starting up, it memorizes what stability looks like in that state. Once the load is on the hook, it can continuously reference and cross-reference that baseline. On top of that, we use GPS to track the exact heading within 360 degrees at all times, which feeds into our position hold function, our memory functions, and works alongside the onboard compass.
WRE: So it knows where it’s oriented, and if you tell it to hold position, it holds — using motorized fans?
Rosenberger: That’s right. I compare them to jet engines on an airplane, except they are electric. They’re high-end RC-style fans. The same fan technology attaches to helicopter rescue devices utilized for hoist extractions. We’ve modified them and scaled them up significantly for construction industry applications, since we’re dealing with much greater loads and forces. It’s not as simple as bolting a propeller on each end of a spreader bar, you won’t get the torque, thrust, power, reliability, or robustness you need without purpose-built systems behind it.
Company Background: Vita Inclinata Technologies
WRE: Tell me about the parent company — Vita Inclinata Technologies — and how the Load Navigator fits into the broader organization.
Rosenberger: Vita Inclinata Technologies is the parent company, with distinct business units, such as Vita Industrial and Vita Aerospace/Air Rescue Systems (ARS). Vita started by developing this technology for helicopter rescues after our CEO lost his mentor to cardiac arrest in a search and rescue training incident. During this incident, the rescue device couldn’t be lowered due to environmental conditions and rotor wash, so the helicopter was forced to turn back. As in construction and industrial lifts, the primary stabilization method for hoist and load operations under a helicopter was a tagline. This method is not only outdated, but also imprecise, inefficient and unsafe. So while our first product was developed for the Aerospace industry to prevent the chaotic motion of rescue litters under helicopters by designing load stabilization devices for the military’s Department of Defense, we expanded our focus and proprietary technology to other industries, specifically construction and lifting operations with cranes.
About six years ago, companies in the green energy and construction space started reaching out, asking if we could build something similar for their applications. We went through that development process, and about five years ago, we launched our standard industrial product line.
Mentioned above, we also acquired a company called Air Rescue Systems (ARS), which is a part of our Aerospace division. If you saw the Artemis splashdown and the recovery operation, the extraction devices used on the astronauts when they were retrieved from the capsule were designed and manufactured by ARS. ARS provides advanced technology, comprehensive helicopter rescue training, and equipment.
The life-safety mission is consistent across everything we do. We came from life safety on the aerospace side and we care about it just as deeply on the industrial side — even though they’re very different applications.
Caleb Rosenberger’s Professional Background
WRE: Tell us about your background and experience in the lifting industry.
Rosenberger: I have about a decade of experience in crane and rigging. I started as a driver hauling and building cranes for RMS Cranes, became a rigger, then a crane operator, worked for Mammoet for a period, and then moved into managing wind and renewable energy operations for ML Crane Group — before it transitioned to Crane Service. After that, I became an advisor to Vita Inclinata, and they eventually offered me a full-time role to lead training and education efforts on the industrial Go-to-Market side.
Market Acceptance and Penetration
WRE: I believe I saw you at ConExpo in 2023. How broadly is the VLN in use at this point? Do you have a solid and growing user base, or is there still a lot of open field ahead of you?
Rosenberger: Both, really. In construction and energy, it traditionally takes significant time or a forcing event to change how people do things; that’s just the nature of the industry. And adoption does vary by region. We’ve seen faster uptake in some parts of Europe, for example, depending on the application, but we have seen a lot of growth globally. And adoption does vary by region. We’ve seen faster uptake in some parts of Europe, for example, depending on the application, but we have seen a lot of growth globally. In a multitude of sectors too; whether its’ working with tilt-ups and concrete wall forms, exterior façades like we are doing out on the Vegas Hard Rock Hotel currently, mass timber much like Arkansas’ Anthony Timberlands Center, or even the massive uptick in data center or micro-processing center work; we are seeing that the VLN can support crews in installing safer and faster. A really cool sector that my team has been enthusiastic about lately is the heavy civil space. The challenges they face in that environment with weight, location of project, complexity of lifts – are a very interesting issue to solve for our team. There’s also an inherent trust dimension: who’s on your team, who do they know, who do people trust? Skepticism is universal.
We’ve been to ConExpo twice now, and each year we’ve roughly tripled our market awareness. We focus on reaching the right customers in the right context: primarily general contractors and subcontractors, with crane companies following their clients’ lead, and ConExpo has been a great way to uncover new potential customers.
One factor that would help increase Market Acceptance and Penetration is addressing the disconnect between pre-construction and the crews conducting the work. We demonstrate a clear return on investment from our data when crews use the VLN. However, conversations around this have to happen at both ends – the crew finishing a job needs to hand off what they learned to the team precon teams planning the next one. This is a definite problem in the construction industry at the moment, it is why we have seen so many general contractors invest in programs and mediums to share this info internally. f they’re not asking ”what would have happened if we’d used the VLN here?” “What did we gain?” “Were there times we would have been delayed if we didn’t have the VLN” when they are reviewing completed projects and planning the next, then those teams lose out on the experiences the crew before them prevailed and/or struggled through.
Education is also a significant part of the adoption process. Every rental or sale includes a required familiarization and manufacturing training, which takes a day and a half to two days. We also offer a train-the-trainer program for companies that want to run their training internally, and it generally works well for companies that have multiple crew members who will be engaging and operating the VLN on multiple job sites. The system itself is intentionally simple: six buttons, a speed control, an on/off switch, and an emergency stop. But people who’ve been doing things the same way for twenty or thirty years need time to shift their thinking. Once they get hands-on and see how the system works with their rigging (angles, beam positioning), and once they see that the VLN genuinely makes their jobs easier, the skepticism disappears. Every project where a client has fully embraced the system has returned incredibly positive results, both in safety and on the financial side.
Return on Investment
WRE: What actually drives that return? Is it working in higher wind conditions, replacing manpower on taglines, efficiency gains — what are the factors?
Rosenberger: It’s both productivity and efficiency. On the wind side, we have a tool that calculates exactly what wind conditions you can work in – up to the crane manufacturer’s rated cutoffs – and that translates directly into time savings and avoided downtime. On the efficiency side, consider placing a facade panel: if the setup needs a quick adjustment, instead of bringing the load all the way back to ground level, you can hold it suspended and controlled in the air. With repetitive picks – offloading trailers, for instance – if you know the next trailer will be ready in five minutes versus twenty, you don’t have to return to stage; you just wait. Those incremental savings add up quickly.
On labor, I always push back on the idea that we’re replacing jobs. No one’s job title is ‘tagline holder.’ We invented that task because we never had a better option. What the VLN does is free up experienced riggers, operators, foremen, and installers to do the actual work they’re hired to do. Instead of six people on a tagline, you have one person with a remote. That’s not eliminating a role – that’s using your crew where they add value.
Applications: Where the VLN Works Best
WRE: Are there particular applications or types of users where you’re seeing the strongest acceptance? And are there areas where you feel like the product would really help but you’re running into more resistance?
Rosenberger: Civil work is probably the biggest area where we have an awareness gap, more than a resistance problem. The VLN is widely recognized in the panel installation space – everyone knows panels spin out of control, so we get a lot of traction there. But civil applications like CCAP pour for bridge deck elevations and road work are less visible in our marketing, and that’s on us to fix. CS McCrossan in Minnesota, for example, has been using our system for about a year and a half for sound wall installation along the highway. Their productivity for that application improved dramatically – getting through panels at roughly a third of the time they’d needed before. It’s not primarily a wind story there; it’s simply about control and speed. They’ve actually started putting more pressure on their sound wall manufacturers to ensure consistent, on-time delivery because their crane operation is no longer the bottleneck.
On the heavier-lift side, we’re doing things that go well beyond what most people associate with the VLN. Our standard beam maxes out at 40 metric tons, but we can remove the fan tubes and e-box from the beam and attach them directly to the load. This July, we’re working on a public bridge project with Central Bridge Company and Crossland as the GC in Oklahoma City – a single pick of 380,000 pounds over a river using an LR 11000 crawler. We’ll attach two of our VLN 2.0 units on either end of the load with a quick-connect system and run an ethernet cable between them. Our systems are designed to communicate – you can link two, four, or six units – which multiplies torque output as needed. We’re also developing cantilever configurations to get underneath overhangs.
Asia is one of our most active markets, with many customers using our systems across Japan and Korea, and they are doing very creative work. They share what they’re doing with us even though they don’t publish much content externally. We’re excited to bring some of those approaches to U.S. projects now, starting with this bridge pick in July. We’re planning significant documentation and marketing around that project once it’s complete.
Partnership with Caldwell
WRE: I remember seeing some press items from Caldwell Lifting Solutions about a beam collaboration with you. Has that been a productive partnership?
Rosenberger: Very much so. Our standard modular beam is Caldwell’s Duralift. They’re lightweight, modular, and reconfigurable quickly in the field – which matters a lot in real-world applications. And the team there has been outstanding to work with.
I recently went through Caldwell’s full Product Catalog Familiarization Training in Wisconsin and came away genuinely impressed by the breadth of their product line. We’re looking at expanding into more of their offerings. We intentionally try not to be exclusive with any one partner because there’s a lot of excellent equipment out there, but Caldwell is one of our top partnerships.
Trade Shows and Go-to-Market Activity
WRE: Beyond ConExpo, where else have you been exhibiting? What’s been productive?
Rosenberger: ConExpo is our biggest event and has been our most successful. We’ve also done World of Concrete, SC&RA events, and AGC chapter events, where regional partnerships with other companies have made those appearances particularly effective. We’re also, of course, running our own outreach; I just finished a Texas road show, and right now my personal focus markets are Texas and Florida.
On Monday we were at a Google data center project in Dallas with ProLift Rigging, CICB, and Holder Construction. We set up a crane on site and ran a live demonstration for the entire project team. Next week, I’m speaking at the IBR – Industry Business Roundtable – event in Houston, which is their first off-site meeting. It’s being held at CICB, and we’re going to cover the safety case, the precision and efficiency gains, and what this technology means for people doing lifting work every day.
Getting people hands-on is really the key. I can show anyone a video, but until they use it themselves, they won’t fully believe what it can do.
Future Development
WRE: What does the development roadmap look like? Where is this technology going?
Rosenberger: We’re finding more creative ways to integrate our system with existing and new below-the-hook equipment; combining it with other control axes through partnerships, and potentially integrating it directly into cranes.
We’re also continuing to scale up for heavier and larger lifts – which ultimately means more power and more torque – as well as we’re expanding the cantilever and multi-unit configurations that allow us to tackle picks and placements that weren’t previously possible.
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Vita Inclinata was founded on the belief that lack of technology should never be the difference between life and death for rescue crews, crane operators, and patients. To learn more about the company and their products, visit www.vitaindustrial.com.