*ahem* I noticed my name flag and I figured even though its been a while and the topic did get sidetracked I should try and answer the question of what pilots do when there's no fighting going on.
Simply put they train. A lot. A modern day pilot must log in so many flight hours a month just to remain qualified to fly their aircraft and I would imagine armor pilots should be doing the same. True with this tech level they can fly simulations just like today but nothing really beats the experience gained from real life learning.
They must remain proficient and study for any sort of contingency from malfunctions, bad weather, poor flying conditions, etc. In space I imagine you could have drills invovling decompression, system failures, radiation flashes from explosions, and other crazy space phenomena or combat situation.
With so many pilots needing to log in hours you need to schedule such training plus there's a LOT of paperwork that goes along with flying. There's pre and post flight brief/debriefs, signing in and out, updating your training records and talking to maintenance. True a lot of this can be automated but should still want that human perspective to let the mechanic know that the controls were hanging a little bit to the left by a few degrees. You know, stuff that a regular diagnostic wouldn't pick up. Those little glitches that are so slight you wouldn't even notice them unless you really paid attention. Also there's the whole what if you saw something suspicious aspect. Okay remember when Eve saw that 'new' Armor on Tami and reported it to SAINT? Normally what happens is you get debriefed and during the debrief you say 'Oh btw I saw something weird which intel might find interesting' and either give the debriefer the run down if his clearance is high enough, or they refer you to an intel board for another debrief regarding such a thing.
I imagine a Neko's brain would be in less need to do so much training since I think for them skills are not as perishable as they are with humans who can lose them when they get out of practice. But there's still other jobs to do. Plus even though you've got an AI system monitoring space for hostiles I imagine you would still want to send out a manned patrol to perform security around installations.
So yeah a pilots life outside of combat is still a very busy one. You train as much as possible because in the end it is your training and skill that saves your life out there.
Oh and I'm not a pilot yet but I am working on it.