Somewhat OT: Harriers and Helicopters

[copeab]

Originally Posted by Webstral

For reasons that I don’t understand, the Japanese were not successful at replacing the pilots lost at Midway.

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.

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.

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.