Precision Load Control
Top Left: For the two-girder picks, one Vita Navigator was clamped to the top flanges near each end of the girders using a frame custom designed by Central Bridge. Top Right: For each bridge, Central Bridge set five girders, two sets of two girders already connected as pairs, plus one single girder.
Looking for a solution to the load-control challenge, Central Bridge President Gary Quinonez remembered seeing Vita Industrial demonstrate Vita Load Navigators at the ConExpo trade show in 2023 and 2026, so he reached out to Caleb“ Rosie” Rosenberger, Vita Industrial’ s global executive account manager, product training.
“ Even if the jobsite arrangement would have enabled using taglines, the girders were just too large for humans to control by using them,” said Quinonez.“ The Navigators were a better answer.”
Cooperative Effort
In just two and a half months, Quinonez, Rosenberger, two Vita engineers, and Greg White and Reece Fuller from Northwest Crane analyzed the girder-control challenge and devised a plan to use two Vita Load Navigator 2.0 load controllers to manage rotation of the 10 girders, which measured 230 feet long, 8 feet high, and weighed up to 426,000 pounds per lift.
“ Whenever we plan lifts that combine a Vita Load Navigator with a crane, we collaborate with the crane user or a lift planner to make sure the load reactions and wind loadings stay safely within the crane’ s design,” said Rosenberger.
“ This was a first for all of us,” said Quinonez.“ No one had ever before paired two air-propulsion load controllers on something this big, let alone in the kind of winds common in Oklahoma.”
After confirming that the two-Navigator system would be an excellent solution for controlling each load without taglines, Central Bridge rented two Vita Load Navigator 2.0 units, and the lifting team worked out the details of the setup.
The team decided the most effective arrangement would be to mount one Navigator 2.0 near each end of the single or double girders that were being lifted, arrange for the two Navigators to talk to each other so they could work in unison, and design the control system so both could be operated with just one wireless remote control.
Precise Process
Too long to be shipped in one piece, each
www. cranehotline. com • September 2026 11