He assesses the low morale at most major American airlines caused by bankruptcies, pay cuts, union strife and the decimation of retirement pensions. He refers to these things as “the insults of an airline career.”

Image William Langewiesche Credit... Clovis Franca

He painstakingly reconstructs what happened that January day on Flight 1549, and spends a good deal of time talking about the damage birds can do to an aircraft. He writes about how the National Transportation Safety Board goes about its work, and about the physics of gliding. The book is also filled with hair-raising stories of other flights in peril, the kind of thing Mr. Langewiesche writes about as well as anyone alive.

He is so familiar with airplanes that his descriptions of how they work are simple and revelatory.

“Jet engines are air compressors,” he writes. “They gulp the outside air, compress it with fans and fire, and shove it out the back at high speed.”

This book’s true hero  this will be an additional insult to some of Sully’s admirers  is a Frenchman, a former test and fighter pilot named Bernard Ziegler, whom Mr. Langewiesche calls “one of the great engineers of our time.”

In the 1970s and ’80s, working for Airbus, Mr. Ziegler and his colleagues perfected a revolutionary system known as “fly-by-wire control,” marrying electrical circuits and digital computers to make almost perfect flying machines. “Within the limits of physics and structural science,” Mr. Langewiesche writes, “Ziegler and his colleagues identified the wrinkles of conventional handling and mostly ironed them out.”

The airplanes that resulted  including the Airbus A320  are not only easy to fly and filled with redundancies that make mechanical backup systems unnecessary, but they will also not let pilots make certain mistakes. The airplane “will intervene to keep people alive,” Mr. Langewiesche writes.

Because these rare interventions cannot be overridden, they are not popular with all pilots. The fly-by-wire system wasn’t designed to protect passengers from people like Sully, Mr. Langewiesche writes, but from “people at the low end of the scale, who occasionally will be at the controls of any airplane that is widely sold and flown. Unsafe pilots? Sure, of course, there are quite a few, and testing can only go so far in weeding them out.”