In the summer of 2005, when Captain Chafik Gharby lost power in both engines of the small commercial plane he was flying from Italy to Tunisia, he was initially hailed as a hero for bringing the plane down on the sea off Sicily, which allowed 23 of the 39 people on board to swim to safety.
Then the story got more complicated.
During an investigation of the events that led to the crash-landing, Italian authorities recovered the cockpit voice-recorder from the wreckage of the ATR-72 turboprop plane and heard that Captain Gharby had turned the controls over to his co-pilot during the emergency and uttered a prayer, instead of following standard procedures that might have allowed him to land the plane at an airport.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/court-in-italy-convicts-pilot-who-prayed-before-crash/