Could Flight 1549's A320 have made it back to LaGuardia?

In simulators at Airbus's training center in Toulouse, programmed to recreate the conditions of Flight 1549, pilots repeatedly managed to turn back and land on a runway at LaGuardia after losing engine power. The simulations showed that the aircraft could have made it back to LaGuardia if it had turned toward the airport immediately after the bird strike. Only seven of the thirteen simulated returns to LaGuardia succeeded, and only one of the two attempts to Teterboro.

The immediate turn the pilots made in the simulations did not reflect or account for real-world considerations, such as the time needed to recognize the impact and decide on a course of action. A later simulation, in which a 35-second delay was inserted to allow for that, ended in a crash. That scenario would have required Sullenberger to decide immediately, with little or no time to assess the situation, with no way of knowing whether he would succeed and risking a catastrophic accident over a densely populated area.

Before the NTSB, Sullenberger argued that there was no time to get the plane to any airport and that attempting it would probably have killed the occupants and more people on the ground. The board concluded that Sullenberger made the right decision, reasoning that the checklist for a dual-engine failure is designed for higher altitudes, where pilots have more time to deal with the situation. Although an emergency return to LaGuardia's runway 13 was technically feasible from the standpoint of the aircraft's performance, the emergency landing on the Hudson appears to have been the more appropriate decision.