Sink or swim

The images of the US Airways Airbus A320 floating in the Hudson River (above) beamed across the globe showed that the seemingly impossible had been achieved.

An airliner had ditched, it was intact, and its precious human cargo stood huddled on the wing. Amidst a flotilla of ferries, the Airbus bobbed gently in the freezing water as its passengers were evacuated to shore in a relatively orderly manner. Then almost as quickly as the passengers had been rescued, a single question surfaced: “How had the near impossible been achieved?” January’s US Airways flight 1549 was a rare but not unprecedented occurrence.