This film contains one of the most faithful cockpit reconstructions in recent memory and pairs it with an investigation that did not happen the way it is shown. Both halves teach the same lesson, from opposite directions.

First, the credit, because it is substantial. The accident sequence tracks the real event closely: the bird strike shortly after departure, the loss of thrust in both engines, the captain's early decision to start the auxiliary power unit ahead of the written checklist sequence — a deviation later praised because it preserved the aircraft's electrical systems and flight-control protections. The radio calls use the airline's actual call sign and recognisable distress phraseology. The flap setting, the ditching technique — nose up, wings level, gentle descent rate — and the cabin crew's brace commands are all drawn from the record. The film even respects the brutal arithmetic at the heart of the event: the entire sequence, from bird strike to water, lasted 208 seconds. Most productions would have padded it. This one let it be short.

Then there is the second movie inside the movie.

Finding 1 — The investigators as prosecutors

The film's dramatic engine is a safety board portrayed as trying to prove the captain wrong — sceptical, adversarial, lying in wait. That is not how accident investigation works, structurally or culturally. Real investigations are run as cooperative technical exercises with the operator, the manufacturer, and the pilots' representatives all inside the process, because the goal is prevention, not prosecution. People who served on the real board objected publicly to their portrayal. The film needed an antagonist. The event did not contain one, so one was issued.

Finding 2 — The simulator ambush

On screen, piloted simulator runs are staged live at a public hearing, with the crew watching their own decision re-litigated in real time. In reality, simulator studies were part of a long technical investigation; the results appeared in analysis and in the final report, not as a courtroom reveal. And the famous adjustment — adding a realistic reaction-time delay before any turn back toward the airport, after which the simulated returns failed — was incorporated by the investigators themselves as ordinary human-factors method. The film hands that insight to the captain as a debate-winning blow. In reality it was the system doing its job.

Finding 3 — The compressed clock

The film places the decisive hearing within days of the accident, with careers hanging on the outcome. The actual investigation ran well over a year from accident to final report. Compression is a normal screenwriting tool. But compressing fifteen months of methodical work into a week of jeopardy is what converts an investigation into a trial — and that conversion is the film's central inaccuracy.

Finding 4 — The framing of "you could have made it back"

The film leans on the idea that simulations proved a return was possible, until the reaction-time argument rescued the crew. The fuller record is less cinematic and more interesting: returns succeeded in simulation only when the turn began essentially instantly after the bird strike — a condition no real crew facing a novel, untrained, double-engine failure at low altitude could meet. The decision to ditch was not vindicated by a clever argument. It was vindicated by arithmetic.

Here is the irony the production half-understood. The real story — a quiet cockpit, a checklist written for high altitude being run out of time at low altitude, 208 seconds, a captain choosing the river because the numbers left nothing else — is more frightening and more dramatic than any tribunal. Real procedure under real pressure does not need a villain. It needs a clock, and this event came with one.