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Originally Posted by Webstral
For reasons that I don’t understand, the Japanese were not successful at replacing the pilots lost at Midway.
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The Japanese pilot training program was not geared to producing trained pilots in a fairly short time (unlike the Americans and most other major combatants). I don't think the Japanese every really modified their pilot training program sufficiently to account for having to quickly replace losses.
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The Japanese filled the cockpits, but their pilots were lacking in flying time. The Marianas Turkey Shoot was more a context between veteran Americans and freshman Japanese than a referendum on airframes.
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by the end of the war (1944-45), the main barrier to Japanese (and German) pilot training was lack of fuel, so the trainees were getting insufficient flight time before being thrown into combat. The Germans had a partial solution by retraining pilots of aircraft types of marginal use late in the war as fighter pilots; I don't know if the Japanese did this.