I read that one reason for the Axis high kill numbers was their pilots were there for life while allied pilots did get rotated back home. Those are some eye opening numbers, wow. We did start the war with some inferior aircraft, only hard learned tactics made them effective.
I just lifted this short paragraph below from a longer article about Georg-Peter Eder to illustrate your point. Some pilots flew even 1000 missions. Hans Ulrich Rudel flew 2500 mostly in the Stuka in a ground attack role. When you think of the chance of accident or mechanical malfunction, aside from being shot at, to survive seems incredible. These stories are not well known as they fought on the "wrong" side and lost but they are typical of many, many pilots. I think Hartmann was an exception never being shot down by another pilot but I believe he was brought down by ground fire more than once. Stalin himself placed a reward on Rudel's head of 1000 rubels. Nobody ever collected and Rudel survived the war.
The Germans had a strict accounting method so the numbers are considered fairly accurate.
About Georg-Peter Eder
Altogether he flew 572 combat missions of which 150 were with the Me 262. On the Eastern Front Eder scored 10 victories and on the Western Front 68, of which no less than 36 were four-engined bombers. With the Me 262 he scored at least 24 victories (most of them couldn`t be officially confirmed). He was the leading scorer against the four-engined bombers, although
Eder himself was shot down 17 times, baling out 9 times. He was wounded 14 times. He survived the war.
The heavily armed big bombers where considered to be a difficult and dangerous adversary.
