WHAT a filmmaker Clint Eastwood is, at age 86 still directing films that engage our attention and command our admiration.

This time Eastwood’s theme is aviation, not imaginary aviation but a re-creation of a real aviation incident on January 15, 2009, when Chesley Sullenberger safely landed an Airbus A320 carrying 155 people on the Hudson River when, two minutes after leaving LaGuardia airport, a bird-strike destroyed both engines. Everybody on board survived.

That whole incident began and ended within 24 minutes. It had no equal in the annals of commercial aviation until November 4, 2010, when Richard de Crespigny and his crew safely landed QF32, an Airbus A380 carrying 440 passengers and 29 crew, after an engine exploded four minutes after take off from Singapore. That took over two hours. Everybody on board survived.

The film operates in a relatively tight dramatic envelope, although inevitably it contains a scattering of human interest passages, some of which writer Tom Komarnicki may have confected to smooth its flow. Tom Hanks plays Sullenberger and Aaron Eckhart plays the second officer.

Much of the film involves the bureaucratic paranoia that followed the incident, when an Aviation Safety Bureau enquiry tried to nail Sullenberger to the wall for not having returned to LaGuardia or the nearby alternative airport at Teterboro. I was waiting for him to say: “I was there, you were not.”

Both captains in these two incidents went on to publish books about them. I’ve read only “QF32” – several times. An Australian movie company toyed with the idea of making a film about it, but that fell through. Inevitable, but regrettable.

At all cinemas