William Langewiesche has a simple, but important, tale to tell and, for the most part, he tells it very well indeed. On 15 January 2009, US Airways flight 1549 from LaGuardia, New York to Charlotte, North Carolina collided with a flock of Canada geese while climbing through 2,700ft above the Bronx river, a minute and a half after take-off. The birds were sucked into the fans of the jet engines of the Airbus A320, and these failed.

With professional aplomb, 58-year-old Captain Chesley Sullenberger brought the aircraft down safely, and smoothly in the circumstances, on the Hudson river. Although a few were injured, all 150 passengers and five crew survived. The flight had lasted five minutes and eight seconds.

What Langewiesche, a working pilot for 15 years and, today, Vanity Fair's international correspondent, discovers in the course of this short book about an even briefer flight is that Sullenberger's skill and exemplary calmness under pressure were matched and in certain key ways bettered by the fly-by-wire technology of his aircraft.

The unsung hero of the hour, whom Langewiesche seeks out, was Bernard Ziegler, former senior vice-president for engineering at Airbus. This former French Air Force fighter pilot and Algerian war veteran not only test-piloted the Airbus A320 but was the brains behind its revolutionary "flight envelope protection" system. This allows the A320 to be flown to its limits without pilots being able to over-extend the aircraft. In other words, the A320 is capable of looking after itself when pilots mess up. If, of course, it's being flown far too low, or towards a mountain, there is little the A320 can to do save itself, its passengers and crew.

It might be, according to Lange­wiesche, the "most audacious civil airplane since the Wright brothers' Flyer", but the A320 is not a sentient being, nor some omnipotent computer. And yet, when things go wrong, especially 2,700ft above the Bronx river and with little chance of the pilot getting the aircraft down to a convenient runway, the A320 has proven to be little short of a mechanical guardian angel.

So there was no "miracle", as the press called it, on the Hudson. Sullenberger did his job perfectly well, as did the Airbus. A case, you might say, of man and machine in perfect harmony. End of short story. Lange­wiesche, though, has other things on his mind. His intimately detailed story of how airliners became more intelligent or safer through design, mirrors a tale of how airline pilots have become increasingly marginalised in a deregulated, low-cost industry, in which the romance of flight and the Jovian status of the pilot have given way to staff putting in more hours for less pay and airlines turning aircraft around at airports faster than car rental agencies wash and refuel a Ford Fiesta. While Langewiesche is hugely impressed, even awe-struck by the charismatic Ziegler, he sees, as clearly as pilots should, that the arrival of the Airbus 320 a quarter of a century ago helped spell the end of the commercial pilot as a truly commanding figure and hero.

The particular circumstances of 15 January 2009, however, did make ­Captain Sullenberger a hero. Lange­wiesche revels in the technical wizardry of the A320, yet, as he explains, it was still Sullenberger's decision not to turn back to LaGuardia  computer simulations after the event showed that he would have crashed  and to use his pilot's intuition and skill to put the aircraft safely into water.

Here then is a crisply, meticulously and dramatically told account of the as yet unresolved story of how humans and advanced technology are learning to form a partnership, with what ultimate consequences we of the early computer and turbo-fan jet age will not live to discover. Langewiesche is a reliable guide to these pioneering days of what, in the right hands  those of Sullenberger and Ziegler  is, hopefully, the start of a beautiful friendship.

There's one thing, though, that grates throughout Fly by Wire: while Americans are essentially good old boys (and girls), tales of comparable air incidents prove that Latins are hysterical  "Pray! Pray! Pray!" they scream  while the English, old-fashioned in an Anne-Hathaway's-cottage way, are amusingly effete.

Langewiesche also pursues his baiting of non-Americans in a ripping collection of aviation articles, Aloft (Penguin, £10.99). In the ­introduction, he writes: "I never wanted to write about flight. It is a genre too easily confused with false heroics, or worse, with tedious transportation history of the British plane-spotter kind." Don't worry, though. Aloft is shot through with all the ­technical stuff a warm beer-drinking Limey might enjoy. It abounds in heart-pounding disasters, inept, screeching foreigners and the poetry of the heavens. It's a truly great read for anyone brought up on a tedious diet of Saint-Exupéry, The Eagle, Pierre ­Clostermann, Guy Gibson's Enemy Coast Ahead and Haynes Manuals of Messerschmitts and Spitfires. ­Langewiesche will not be impressed by a British pilot telling him so, yet for all his jaw-jutting, fly'em-cowboy machismo, he writes as if his pen has wings, his laptop a pair of General ­Electric turbofans.

Jonathan Glancey's Spitfire: The Illustrated Biography is published by Atlantic.

Since this is a book about quick ­reactions, it seems appropriate to ask: after Captain Chesley Sullenberger ditched his Airbus A320 in the icy waters of the Hudson river on 15 January 2009, how long did it take William Langewiesche to decide that the events of that day would be the subject of his next book?

His last, The Atomic Bazaar, delved into the murky trade in secondhand nuclear materials. Before that, The ­Outlaw Sea covered ship-breaking in Bangladesh, the sinking of a passenger ferry and contemporary piracy (an instance of a reporter being a little too ahead of the curve and getting to a story before it became news). These were subjects that interested and came gradually to absorb him. But Langewiesche, I wager, knew within seconds that the story of Airbus A320 had his name ­written all over it.

His father was a pilot who, in 1944, published Stick and Rudder, a benchmark book on flight and navigation. Not surprisingly, William grew up feeling at home in the sky; he trained and worked as a pilot and, in turn, assembled a book of his own aviation pieces. First published in 1998, Inside the Sky combines meditations on his adventures as a pilot and meticulously investigated reports on air crashes. (The essays in that book form the core of an updated and expanded collection, Aloft, to be published as a Penguin Modern ­Classic later this month.) So Langewiesche was uniquely qualified to write about the Hudson ditching. Beyond the realm of sympathetic expertise, however, was a subtler recognition of the subject's broader themes.

Sully's successful crash-landing  not a single life lost  was a symbolic reversal of the catastrophe of 9/11. In ­American Ground (2003), Langewiesche had tracked what he called "the unbuilding of the World Trade Center", the long operation to recover bodies and clear up the devastation at Ground Zero. Although full of praise for the people "without previous rank who discovered balance and ability within themselves" during the excavation, he was, nevertheless, rigorously unsentimental. At a time when the moral authority of the New York City Fire Department was unimpeachable, Langewiesche was pilloried for unearthing incontestable evidence  the cab of a wrecked fire truck, for example, "filled with dozens of new pairs of jeans from the Gap" of looting by some firemen.

Demonstrating a similar willingness to confront "a complex and emotional subject", he is just as adamant about rescuing "the Miracle on the Hudson" from the realm of instant myth. The plane lost both engines to a low-altitude strike by Canada geese minutes after take-off from New York's ­LaGuardia airport. The crew responded ­perfectly, especially Sullenberger, who ­"ruthlessly shed distractions, including his own fear of death" as he urged the stricken plane through what remained of the Manhattan sky and on to the ribbon of water. Such grace under pressure is in keeping with our ideal of the pilot, as famously expressed by Saint-Exupéry's flights of Nietzschean lyricism, or, more recently, by the pragmatic drawl of Chuck Yeager  "I've tried A!  I've tried B!  I've tried C!..."  in Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff. Part of the allure of the Hudson ditching, Langewiesche points out, is that it tempted us to forget that the days of the pilot locked in a lone struggle with ­destiny are pretty much gone.

As he repeatedly insists, it's not just the passengers crammed into economy who are fed up with flying, resigned to the "terrible this-is-my-life monotony of the job"; the pilots themselves are part of "a once-proud profession" in "inexorable decline". This is partly the drearily familiar saga of demoralisation in the wake of deregulation, wage cuts, longer shifts and so on, but it's also a result of the way that, as more and more control has been ceded to computers, pilots have come to resemble frontline passengers, only in a state of permanent, highly knowledgable alertness. The Hudson landing appeared to restore the lofty agency of the pilot to its rightful place, when, in fact  Langewiesche insists  Sully, for all his skill, had the good fortune to be flying a plane of "radical semi-robotic European design". This is the meaning of "flying by wire": the aircraft's built-in safety systems are designed always to overrule and correct the pilot, never vice-versa. Not a bad idea since, in the past dozen or so years, "far more passengers have been killed because of pilots than because of airplane failures".

A pathological example of the former  the extraordinary story is recounted in Aloft  is the Egyptian pilot who, in 1999, declared: "I rely on God" while directing his plane into the sea. Had he been flying an ­Airbus, he would not have been able to do that (and so, paradoxically, his faith might have been justified). A shriller note of fictive resignation is sounded in Don DeLillo's White Noise when a plane goes into a steep dive. Relieved to hear the captain's voice over the intercom, passengers are treated instead to a shrieking announcement of impending doom: "We're a silver gleaming death machine!"

Sully and his co-pilot, by contrast, kept their cool, kept flying  that's the thing about airborne problems, "you cannot just pull over and stop"  and started weighing up their options. He negotiated with air traffic control, decided the Hudson was his best bet, found time to warn ("This is the captain. Brace for impact"), and concentrated on easing the maimed aircraft into the concrete-hard water. Which he did, impeccably. But even if he hadn't, the plane would have overruled him, and did, in fact, iron out a few wrinkles in the glide by "constantly adjusting the control surfaces to provide an extraordinarily stable platform to fly". Metaphorically speaking, Sully won the spelling bee  but was wired up to Microsoft spell check just in case. In Langewiesche's words, the plane "participated actively in the survival of the passengers".

Much of Fly by Wire is rigorously technical but Langewiesche shares with Len Deighton the ability to imbue aeronautical specs and data with a narrative propulsion of their own. Unlike Sully, he is under no compulsion to shed distractions. On the contrary. There is a mass of information about the nesting and migratory habits of the much-maligned Canada geese who did for the plane and themselves (he even consults an expert who speculates on what might have been going through the minds of the geese as the giant Airbus roared into their patch of sky); on the long history of bird strikes (some of which have occurred at a mind-blowing 37,000ft  how do they breathe up there?); and the demographic make-up of the passengers onboard. At times such unwieldy cargo makes this short book handle a little awkwardly but for most of the ride the method established in Aloft  a writing-by-wire combination of interviews, black-box data, cockpit voice recordings and reporterly nous  winds the reader into a state of white-knuckle absorption. It's a tribute to Langewiesche's narrative command that, although the outcome is known, the penultimate section of the book, as the plane approaches the slim hope of the river, vies in brilliance with James Salter's account of two fighter pilots in Korea nursing their fuel-less jets back to base in his Korean war novel, The Hunters.

The focus, inevitably, is on pilot, crew and air traffic controllers but the passengers and, later, a passing ferry play their part, too. The plane is about to hit the water. A passenger near the back shouts: "Exit row people get ready!" Once the plane is in the water there's a bit of a devil-take-the-hindmost stampede but the standard of behaviour remains surprisingly high. Sully is the last person out of his aircraft. It's a wonderful story expertly told, and the ending is not just happy but uplifting: almost everyone involved comes out of it not just safely but extremely well. Except the geese. Their day totally sucked.