im fairly certain that the pelican pickups and dropoffs in the campaign are not done with command lists in sapien and an AI in the pilot seat. so... how are they done? and can i do them or is it a disabled feature?

it's done through recorded animations and scripting and its quite the pain to get working correctly in sapien if you go to file and then click import recording and click on the scenario that has the pelican animations you want it should import.

can i make my own animations?

yes but they will not be recorded animations they will be imported as a model_animations tag and you have to script them in using the custom animation script command.

kay iv made my animation, and iv tried using the custom animation script command, but i dont think im doing it right. the halo scripting bible says the command goes as such (custom_animation ) i get the unit and i sortof get the boolean(what does interpolation mean?) but what needs to go in the animation graph and string fields?

hmmm... i'm not sure i haven't tried custom animations before so ill start trying to figure the script out.