Fighters are pretty expendable. They don't cost a lot of crew when they get the floor wiped with them, they tend to die pretty easily, and though carriers increase their combat lifespan, they tend to melt really quickly when exposed to anything larger than a frigate (No shields versus heavy PD? Bye bye!).
This, combined with the short supply of fighters in the main game means that running a fighter heavy fleet can be a quite the challenge. Is really hard to manage your fleet when the fighters are dying in rather one-sided combats!
So, my suggest would be to have the option of "manufacturing" new fighters from the shells of the lost wings. Instead of having a destroyed fighter wing be gone gone, have it show up in the fleet menu as a Wing that you can spend X amount of supply, and 2/3rds the cost in credits to repair back to new.
Make it take a bit of time, but allowing players to spend resources out on the go (if they have the carriers to do so) to keep their fighter wings up an running. Anyways, thats my suggestion.