it's really easy to land at big airports with tower assistance; the runway would have a lighting system called a visual approach slope indicator that is basically 4 lights that change from red to white depending on the angle you are viewing them from, when the first two are white and the second two are red you are at the correct angle, then all you need is to keep your airspeed in check and you just fly the thing into the ground, no drama at all
this would have been an entirely different situation at a non-towered airport
And that's why they directed them to a towered airport. The aviation world is all about safety and redundancy and backups and all that. What's really neat is that if it were a huge passenger liner, they could just tell the passengers which buttons to press to tell the plane to go land itself.