Three campaign game questions

[skraft16]

Hello,

I've owned WitW for a year or two now, and WitE before that, but I just moved on to the playing the WitW campaign game instead of the scenarios.

Questions:

1. I burned up a lot of my bombers opposing Allied landings in Sicily and Southern Italy. I have been hoarding my trained replacements for my fighters, but I figured I would try to fill my depleted bomber units with untrained pilots and train them. And while I was at that, I put untrained pilots into the residual empty pilot slots in my night fighters, figuring that I am building the night fighters anyway, so I might as well fly all of them instead of most of them, even if a bunch of the poorly crewed ones crash. Hopefully a few of the trainees would survive to be nighttime aces someday.

However, once I did this, my flow of trained pilots for the day fighters collapsed. For the last 3-4 turns since I unleashed the training school dropouts, I have received between 0 and 10 trained pilots per turn. I also noticed this with the Italians, who I burned up and filled the decimated squadrons with trainees to maybe hit something before Italy went under, and the 5-per-turn Italian trained pilot flow dropped to zero.

So, does using untrained pilots destroy your future pool of trained pilots? I can logically see why shipping out anyone who can sit in an aircraft would send a "couple classes" of in-progress trainees to the front, and those class slots would have to start all over again with raw recruits, but it is not a relationship I see documented in the manual. Or since I am playing the Eastern Front option for the first time, is my dropoff in trained pilots due to the Russian Front screaming for replacements?

2. Does anyone have a good idea of how many Axis construction units are available in mid-1943 to expand airfields, repair high-priority bombed factories and auto-repair bombed railways, ports and airfields? I don't want to go nuts on factory repair, and find that I completely run out of repairmen for my transport and airfields.

3. Speaking of 2.--if I want to get some of the construction battalions sitting in corps/armies to work on repair, do I change the HQ for those to either OB West, Army Group B or Army group C?

Thanks for your replies!