Well, I again have to admit surprise... after looking around, it appears that this is the first ATTEMPTED ditching by either Boeing-737 or its knockoff, the Airbus-320. There have been a few crashes into water, but this seems to be the first controlled flight into the water.
So, yeah, I’ll reiterate what I wrote earlier: I wouldn’t be surprised if, to the pilot, the only time he was really crossing his fingers in this whole incident was when the water was coming up toward him, and he was saying, “Well, this is the one thing I haven’t really done before... I hope to God this works the way I’ve been trained!”...
Actually there’s been one other—a B737-300, Garuda Indonesia 421, in 2002, successfully ditched into a river after a double engine failure in a thunderstorm (shades of Southern 242). There was only one fatality, a flight attendant. It was, however, more of a crash than a ditch, because the river was only a meter deep where they hit.
http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=20020116-0
}:-)4