In 2009, high school student Caleb Carr was on a night-training search and rescue mission in the Oregon mountains when a fellow volunteer suffered a cardiac arrest. The medevac helicopter sent to the scene could not land due to the terrain and attempts to lower a rescue basket failed due to high winds. Eventually, the aircraft left the area, and Carr’s fellow volunteer died.
The incident inspired Carr, now CEO of Vita Inclinata and Broomfield, Colorado-based Vita Aerospace, to seek a solution to the problem. But it wasn’t until his business partner and chief technology officer Derek Sikora hit on an idea while staring out an airliner window that the answer became apparent: a lightweight, computer-controlled package of battery-powered ducted fans that attaches to the bottom of a litter and stabilizes the load—called the Vita Rescue System (VRS). The VRS uses high-powered fans to autonomously mitigate litter basket swinging and spinning during hoist operations, accounting for winds, rotor downwash, and environmental conditions. Using VRS can reduce medevac hoisting times from 20 minutes to two, according to the company.
The technology has wider applications including helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, and cranes for search-and-rescue, military, firefighting, public safety, construction, wind energy, and oil-and-gas missions, among others. The larger Vita Lifting System is also used in a variety of heavy-lift construction operations, including wind turbine installation and maintenance, and ski lift pole placement. The company was founded in 2015 and delivered 42 systems from December 2021 through the first quarter of 2023.
“Derek, was sitting on a plane and basically looked at a jet turbine and said ‘Why the hell not?’” Carr told AIN. The idea was cultivated in a garage with inexpensive Chinese fans mounted onto a small drum. “We validated that you can swing up things using fans to control them. That would have never been possible 15 years ago, because eVTOL [electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft] is what’s really driven the electric ducted fan market and, along with electric cars, the battery market. Fifteen years ago this type of capability did not exist.”
Today, Vita Aerospace is dedicated to the idea that conventional helicopter hoisting is imprecise, time-consuming, and unsafe and claims that its technology “eliminates tagline issues, human error, and environmental factors from the equation by creating total load stabilization for helicopter hoist operations.” Vita has developed scalable load stabilization systems for civil, parapublic, and military aircraft.
For basic search and rescue litters, the 47-pound underside-mounted VRS is capable of controlling loads up to 1,000 pounds. About half of that weight comes from its potassium-ion batteries, which are good for between 8-16 hoist operations before a recharge of 30 minutes is needed. Carr said the company chose potassium batteries over lighter lithium-ion cells for safety reasons. “If you’re going to have a system near a patient, you’re going to want batteries that do not have the capacity of becoming inflamed,” Carr said. “We’ve spent millions of dollars in innovating those batteries and prevent just that.” He expects to be able to lighten the VRS “as battery technology improves.” Meanwhile, the system is designed for fast battery swaps. Carr notes that during a recent demonstration with the Portuguese Air Force, sorties were flown all day via battery swaps.
Being able not only to stabilize the load, but also direct it can have other operational advantages such as being able to minimize the impact of rotor wash, particularly for water rescues. In a recent demonstration, the company proved the ability “to fly a litter off-axis underneath the helicopter,” said Carr. “We can actually fly a load to the left or the right beneath the aircraft, breaking the border [of the rotor wash].”
There also are potential applications for manned and unmanned fixed-wing aircraft with a modern adaption of the Fulton Surface-To-Air Recovery System utilized by the CIA and various military branches for retrieving personnel during the Cold War, Carr said.
Training on the VRS consists of three hours of initial classroom instruction and six hours of flight time, assuming previous hoist operations experience. Additional training is required for specific mission types. By way of example, Carr said it took roughly two days last year to train crews that did not have previous search and rescue experience on the VRS for use in Ukraine with a medevac Mil Mi-8 twin-turbine helicopter. Ukraine has requested 30 VRS systems for use by helicopter fire and rescue units.
Maintenance is a relatively simple affair. There’s a required annual inspection and preflight checks. Carr points out that “there are only four moving parts in the system,” so unless it is being used in a saltwater environment, maintenance requirements are minimal. During preflight, a crewmember would examine the fan tubes to check for breakages or obstructions. “That’s basically it,” Carr said, noting that the company provides support both from headquarters and from field technicians.
Systems built to military specifications can cost upwards of $250,000 while land-based systems are available for a fraction of that price. Delivery times on orders are averaging 60 days, even accounting for ongoing supply chain disruptions. Carr said his manufacturing team “did a pretty good job of buying considerable inventory last year” even though it required “putting a lot of money forward.”
Carr said Vita is aggressively pursuing military and foreign markets for the technology and is having discussions about applying it to tiltrotor aircraft. He noted that it is already deployed on Leonardo AW139 intermediate twin-engine helicopters used for search and rescue operations in the United Arab Emirates. The technology could be applied to helicopters as small as an Airbus H125 turbine single, he added.
And he’s also looking at lift pole installation in Saudi Arabia, where a mammoth ski resort is being planned using man-made snow. The resort will be part of the proposed $500 billion, 10,000-sq-mi Noem complex. “It’s going to be six times the size of Breckenridge [Colorado ski resort]. Speaking as a guy who lives in Colorado, that’s really going to be something.”