After the crash, after everyone pulled themselves out the wreckage of the single-engine airplane in the Alphabet Hills north of remote Glennallen in Southcentral Alaska on Sunday, 30-year-old Wayne Humbert reached into his pocket and pulled out a yellow, six-ounce, palm-size satellite messaging device called "Spot."

On its face there were four buttons. A battered Humbert, knowing he and three friends in the airplane now a tangle of metal in the wilderness were in trouble, pressed the one that said "help."

A signal went almost instantaneously to a satellite circling above the globe. The satellite, in turn, bounced the signal back to Globalstar headquarters in Louisiana, where a computer identified Humbert as the registered owner of a four-year-old first-generation Spot.

A call was put in immediately to his wife in Anchorage. She wasn't home. So Globalstar left a message and called the second person on Humbert's notification list -- his mom.

"She's in Arizona," Humbert said Tuesday, safely home and recovering from the crash. Mom wasn't quite sure what to do, so Globalstar again called Humbert's wife. This time they made a connection and told her what had happened.

She called Alaska State Troopers, and Alaska Wildlife Troopers based out of Glennallen were in the air and on their way to the crash scene before the Emergency Locator Transmitter aboard 30-year-old Robert Wesley Price's single-engine Cessna 185 was picked up.

Those Federal Aviation Administration-required ELTs have become a subject of considerable discussion among small-plane pilots and regular Bush fliers in Alaska this summer. ELT failures are a well-documented fact in U.S. aviation, and Alaska witnessed a couple that rose to very high profile in August.

First there was the failure of an ELT in a GCI-owned deHavilland Otter that crashed near Dillingham Aug. 9, killing former U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, telecommunications executive Dana Tindall and three others. The ELT triggered after the crash, but the impact tore the device free from its antennae. As a result, its signal could barely be heard until rescuers were almost on top of the crash site. Because its range was so limited, a search for the downed plane and the four people who survived the crash didn't begin until the Agulowak Lodge reported the single-engine amphibious plane had not returned from a daylong fishing excursion that began hours and hours before the crash.

Then, only weeks after the GCI crash and in the same general area of Southwest Alaska, a Branch River Air Service deHavilland Beaver carrying a pilot and three young employees of the National Park Service disappeared in Katmai National Park and Preserve. No signal from its ELT was ever heard.

Weeks of searching for the aircraft failed to find a trace. Eventually, the search was called off. That plane remains missing as this is written, its passengers presumed dead.

Humbert, meanwhile, is happy to have been found and rescued along with Anchorage hunting buddies Grant Smith, Brad Vassau and Price, who suffered a serious back injury in the crash and remains hospitalized.

Smith and Vassau are, like Humbert, battered and sore but otherwise fine.

Price had outfitted his plane with the newest 406 MHz ELT. But Humbert grabbed his four-year-old Spot at the last minute anyway.

"I hadn't re-registered it," he added. "A couple of guys were supposed to have them, but they didn't. So I grabbed it. I work on a boat, so I know this technology works, and it's nice to have multiple options."