Well now, keep in mind - most of the pilots in Standoff already have a kill score when they show up on the carrier. IIRC, some of them have more than a hundred kills. So, those kill scores reflect more than just the current campaign.
That said, the game's random killboard inflation does produce a rather weird result overall. We had no control of it, so we couldn't tone it down - I wish, for example, that we could specify that bomber pilots do not get so many kills (look at Saxman up there, in that screenshot - jeepers, that guy hardly ever shoots at fighters, and yet...). Sillier still, you can see how fake it is when you watch what happens to pilots who fly with you regularly. They start to fall behind... because if they fly on a mission with you, their kill score is only increased by the amount that they actually killed during the mission (usually no more than a couple of ships). But if they don't fly with you, then their kill score is increased by a random amount
based on the player's kill score. The player's kill scores tend to be high, so...
On a sidenote - we actually made sure to implement sensible kill scores for all pilots, including those that never show up on the roster. If you were to add Blair onto the roster, for example... you wouldn't be able to catch up with him even if you killed every single fighter encountered in Standoff
.