Looking at that last video I fail to understand why the instinct for self preservation did not prevent the 2 puma captains from landing at a greater distance from the Ec155. The camera angle may distort the distance, but perhaps the first Puma got lucky with a slightly different wind and only 1 medium helicopter blowing snow, the other had a medium and heavy running rotors on the ground when he arrived (and as has been said in other posts with a less than optimal techique for the conditions).
Marshallers and other ground crew be damned, the captain decides where to land. In my days on HEMS I sometimes had ground crew cursing me for having to walk an extra 200 metres, but when I deemed it safer to land elsewhere it was done my way.
It would be interesting to see if "experienced" in government units means something different than in commercial operators.
But this seems a mistake due to lack of experience and/or confidence to make a command decision NOT to follow the script when circumstances are worse than scripted.
I hope that the accident investigation will take note of the preparation and planning for the excercise and the apparent lack of flexibility in the snowy conditions. It could and should have been prevented, and multiple layers in the system should have the authority to do so.
What SASless describes are actual combat missions, and I accept that sometimes the job simply has to be done and the crews have to find ways to mitigate the risks. War being one of the scenarios, which is why comparing Berlin to Afghanistan is not right IMO.
But in an excercise it should not be that way. If you find you cannot do what is in the script, bin it and save it for the debrief. It is a learning opportunity after all. This time the lesson was very costly and it needn't be.