I will say I had an extra buggy experience last night too. Out of nine or so missions, we couldn't extract from two of them because no one could enter the pelican. If you did manage to clip into the pelican, you would just hang out in there and never extract.
I can see the justification of the pelican talking off immediately if its damaged. My team makes a conscious effort to consolidate samples and have that player enter the pelican first if it's smoking.