Makes me sad to watch such an unnecessary waste of life! RIP!
Looks like they were trying to use those three marshallers as a reference. Brilliant idea, but why is the 155 keeping their guy on the left? I assume the pilot-flying was in the right seat. He should have kept his reference/marshaller on his side and landed a lot closer/right next to him instead of looking across the cockpit. Makes it a lot harder and he most likely lost his reference at the last moment. All three aircraft are approaching too slow and end up at a unfavourable hover height. Which is too high for a no-hover whiteout landing and too low for a high hover / blow-the-snow-away first landing. The second aircraft appears to actually drift backwards before they make it to the ground. Very dangerous in that situation. The snow hasn't settled yet, but number three comes in for a landing anyways. Why not wait an extra moment and let the snow settle? Professional heliski pilots approach a lot faster to keep the snowball behind the aircraft until they touch down. They "drive" their helicopters right into the snow and always always always end up with their reference right next to them. Never loose your reference! That approach technique might not work for helicopters with wheel type landing gear though. Why not come into a high hover first then, blow the snow away and then work your way down? Instead of marshallers, they should have used stakes as a target. Those marshallers are just standing there, not giving any signals anyway. Might as well get them out of the equation all together.
I dare to say that none of those pilots were proficient enough to land under those conditions. They were lured into a trap and got caught. Unfortunately!
Their superiors should scratch their heads and come up with a good explanation as of why this mission was being conducted under these circumstances with crews that were not properly trained for it. And they could have gotten them a lot of training for the price of those two helicopters alone!
What kind a riot control scenario needs troops to be inserted by helicopter anyways???