With the plane adjusted for hovering (or nearly so), a sudden drop in wind speed would cause you to quickly lose altitude, but you would also be accelerating fo

With the plane adjusted for hovering (or nearly so), a sudden drop in wind speed would cause you to quickly lose altitude, but you would also be accelerating forward relative to the ground to get back up to the former airspeed that the throttle is still set to produce. And the pilot would have had plenty of headroom to increase power, and that would have been an immediate response to an unwanted rate of descent. So a landing would not have been guaranteed, let alone a very hard one–but if you were too close to the ground for the pilot to react in time I could still see the landing being uncomfortable.