I would have to disagree with your comment. Glider skills focus on "total energy" , knowing how far you can go and how to manage glide slopes to maximize lateral distances. As a glider pilot he had a much better feel for what capabilities he had, compared to many motorcraft pilots.
paul
You are of course, entitled to your opinion.
Here is why I disagree:
1. He didn't have time to "feel" anything. He trimmed the aircraft for best glide, and they ran through the checklists. in a very short period of time, they were setting up for the landing. That was the "focus". They undergo simulator training every 6 months, to make all of that routine to them. It's all regimented, and beat into them.
2. All pilots are trained to do power off gliding, it's a basic flight maneuver. Students do it. When the engine fails after take off, the best you can do, is to maintain the preordained published speed, adjusted for your weight at the time. You are not using glider skills, looking for thermals, or updrafts. You are diagnosing the problem, (if you have time), and planning the landing.
3. An airplane doesn't turn into a little two seat glider, when the engine(s) quit. It still an airplane. In this case, a big heavy one. It's not agile. And, it's not going up.
If you read the interviews with Sullenberger, he discusses that the A320 attenuates your control inputs, so even if he had tried to "feel" anything, the computer would not let him "really control it". Here is an excerpt:""
"In the last four seconds of the flight, a little-known software feature of the fly-by-wire system known only to a few software engineers at Airbus, but to no airline pilots and no airline operators, prevented me from achieving that last little bit of performance because of something called the phugoid mode. And had that not inhibited our performance, had that not, as the NTSB in the report euphemistically said, attenuated my inputs, nose e-up commands we wouldn't have hit quite so hard, we wouldn't ave had as much damage and [Flight Attendant] Doreen Welsh might not have been injured in the back when a piece of structure came up through the floor, and the airplane might have floated a little bit higher in the water and a little bit longer. So it's a mixed blessing: It prevented us from making egregious errors, but we didn't anyway, and at the very end it prevented us from getting the nose up quite as much as we theoretically should have been able to. with the kind of quick inputs you need to really control it. That is why the aircraft did not touch down softer. He pulled back hard when the tail hit the water, and the computer buffered it".
