Rather than wait for the CMs to bring the hammer down I figured it would be best to be proactive.
VMF-251 was over max commitment by 1 (so commitment +3). The pilot in question spawned shortly after fields opened and before we had the opportunity to say anything. I PM'ed Repoman to check into shifting him to escorting one of the strike packages rolling out of our field and was given the go-ahead. However inter-squad communications on the Axis squadrons early on was almost non-existent and we were never able to get in touch with the strike squadrons to make arrangements.
I had already adjusted our flight roster to account for this pilot not being there, so was caught off-guard when he rolled a few minutes after the rest of the squad. As it turned out one of our pilots got shot down very early in the fight before the full squadron converged on the enemy (squadron broke up into three four-ship flights to patrol each of the three sectors of our engagement area, and the pilot who was shot down was in the eastern-most and the first to make contact) so we NEVER had thirteen ships in the fight at once, however I take full responsibility for not keeping better control of this, and am currently looking into options to prevent this from happening again.