And as a person who pays for a couple (or more) expensive guys to sit at the front of an airplane and fly me round the world I expect them to at least be able to put it down on the ground without requiring the assistance of anyone/anything on the ground if needs be. Afterall, there's plenty of redundancy on the plane, and I bet there's almost none on the ground.
I agree that the pilots
should have been adequately trained and capable of this apparently basic manouever. However, aviation depends on reducing the risk of anything going wrong by taking a belt-and-braces-and-more-braces-and-some-velcro approach to safety. For a major hub airport to expect all crews to compensate for lack of landing aids over a sustained period seems to me to remove a big layer of redundancy. Is this normal?