Capt. 'Sully' makes CBS News debut

Former U.S. Airways pilot Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger made his debut as a CBS News contributor this week.

Sullenberger appeared on "CBS Evening News" Tuesday to discuss the two-year anniversary of an Air France crash that killed 228 people. He was was hired last month as an aviation and safety expert for the network, and is famous for averting a similar accident in 2009, when he landed a disabled jetliner safely on the Hudson River in New York City.

He said Tuesday on CBS that the Air France crash was going to be "a seminal accident that will be studied for years."

"We need to ask ourselves as an industry tough questions about the way we're designing airplanes, the way we're displaying information to the pilots in the cockpit," he said in his first appearance as a regular television analyst. "And about whether or not making airplanes more complicated, more technologically advanced makes it more difficult for pilots to very quickly intervene and very effectively act when things go awry."

He compared the crash to his own emergency landing, saying he had the advantage of having daylight. His plane's instrumentation was also not completely disabled, Sullenberger added.

"I could see the earth's natural horizon," he said. "I knew which way was up. All my speed sensors still worked. You have to realize how overwhelming and confusing this situation would have been for this Air France crew at night in the weather at the top of the storm. [It was] very turbulent, suddenly losing all their speed references, one of the most critical parameters [in] an airplane, and having to use only the aircraft's pitch attitude and thrust setting to maintain a safe flight. It would have been a very difficult situation and, unfortunately, in this case they were not able to solve their problem in the time that they had."

Sullenberger is new to being a television analyst, but he has been in the national spotlight since his daring 2009 emergency landing. He was invited to President Obama's first address to Congress in February 2009, and this spring, he lobbied against an amendment to the House appropriations bill for the Federal Aviation Administration.