Multiple bases for more aircraft coverage will help later on, of course. (And a second team of troops suitably placed so that your avg/max to-mission distance will be shorter). In 2.2.1, very early on... perhaps the lesson is that you may have to delay or take a slower, wider route and let some or all civilians die rather than risk losing a dropship, your team, *and* the civilians.
As somebody who hasn't been following the game until fairly recently, I idly wonder whether or not ground transportation would fit in certain cases. Even if a dropship is stealthy in terms of radar/heat signature and noise (and if it is, it's going to scream *military* once in visual range unless civvies have become FAR more paranoid, or if technology advances to the point where stealth is non-obvious), doing an airborne assault directly on target against unknown quantities of enemies (which might have figured out that Earth uses military aircraft, and which might leave a couple of soldiers on 'air guard' duty) and where the opposition might have decisive air superiority seems chancy. It might be more reasonable to use the drop ship to reach a location somewhere nearby, and then take something like a truck convoy -- better yet if the trucks were supplied with hardware from a local base, given that trucks might be able to bring more equipment (or, say, limited medical facility) and should be less obvious targets unless civvie traffic is extremely sparse (e.g. far from urban areas).
Course, unless it was massively abstracted out and maybe even then, it'd be a lot of work to design and code (I presume). So the above is largely idle speculation.
