Sully's accomplishment was to know what to do, and to not be seduced by ATC's offers of other runways which were unobtainable.
Actually they've proven he could have made it back.
Sully's accomplishment was not accepting the unknown for the dangerous but maybe survivable known.
The automation in the aircraft could have easily told him if the offered runways were reachable and even recommended it, if there was a dual-engine-out power and range mode programmed into it, with the push of a button.
A glide-distance/range ring is child's play in modern software. Mixing that with "Nearest To" tech would have put USAir down on a runway that day.
It wasn't there out of a perceived lack of need and raw optimism. It's not like dual-engine-outs on twins haven't happened regularly throughout aviation history.
Humans, especially humans designing things in groups, believe their own hype.
"This thing will never have a dual engine-out."
"This thing will never have a triple-hydraulic failure."
"This thing will never have a pilot sit at the controls and continue to pull into a deep stall and hold it while the two other guys wonder what's going on."
"This thing will never be flown in a low-flyby at high Alpha with the Chief Test Pilot at the controls who will not press the TOGA button in time to go-around."
"This thing will never be flown in freezing weather below the rated ops specs for the O-rings even after a meeting called specifically to say it shouldn't is completely corrupted by outside schedule pressures."
The automators/coders didn't code the eventuality because they truly believe these things won't happen.
The managers don't hire skeptics because they're annoying. They aren't "team" players. They slow progress.
Most design groups will have reams of paper and calculations and matrices showing they didn't code something because it was mathematically proven unlikely. And all of that risk analysis will have basically eaten up the time and resources that could have added the feature, ten times over. But the reports make people happier than the person who says "stop, we need to fix this now."
These things that have happened, will again.
NTSB recommended the manufacturers add automatic engine-out routing to runways in the avionics in the final report on the Hudson ditching, if I recall, so no pilot would ever have to guess again.
We'll see if anyone believes them that it's worth adding. The expensive risk analysis reports in both time and money, say no. Once a stack of risk analysis reports that say there's little risk is built to hide behind like a kiddie fort, it's hard to knock it down and re-focus on true risk elimination.
