There’s more than a little bit of tongue in cheek here. As Elmore Leonard makes clear in his article, he doesn’t see his rules as laws of physics; they’re more like capsulizations of guidelines that he finds valuable.

Although I feel sure you’ve read the NTSB report in detail, for the sake of my handful of regular readers I’m going to highlight what it said about the possibility of a return to LaGuardia (4.5 miles from the plane) or a landing at Teterboro (9.5 miles)–not to refute your contention, but to illustrate that informed sources can differ greatly in their assessments.

Simulation flights were run to determine whether the accident flight could have landed successfully at LGA or TEB following the bird strike. The simulations demonstrated that, to accomplish a successful flight to either airport, the airplane would have to have been turned toward the airport immediately after the bird strike. The immediate turn did not reflect or account for real-world considerations, such as the time delay required to recognize the extent of the engine thrust loss and decide on a course of action. The one simulator flight that took into account real-world considerations (a return to LGA runway was attempted after a 35-second delay) was not successful. Therefore, the NTSB concludes that the captain’s decision to ditch on the Hudson River rather than attempting to land at an airport provided the highest probability that the accident would be survivable. [Section 2.3.2]

It’s unfortunate that one of the deposits Sully forgot to make was Rule One of aviation, “See and Avoid”. If he had been watching where he was going, he wouldn’t have ended up going where he was watching. The fact is, this screw-up didn’t have one nanosecond of ‘experience, education, or training’ on what to do in all donkeys gone. First thing: The situation was of his creation and was entirely avoidable. Second thing: instead of heading back to LGA – which was entirely do-able – he was so petrified that he kept flying away from the airport. His myriad of (blank)-ups included taking over control when he, the experienced pilot, should have performed the trouble-shooting; failure to declare an emergency; failure to use emergency frequency; failure to tell crew that it was a ‘water’ impact; failure to use flaps, failure to turn into the wind; failure to hit ditch switch; failure to advise ‘don’t use the doors: wings exits only!’; failure to use his cell to communicate with emergency responders. But he did call his wife.
The man should be facing criminal charges of reckless endangerment.
Now that the feathers have settled, wait for the lawsuits to come out of the woodwork.