I recently watched a video about the Battle of Midway on YouTube, and something about the battle really confused me. Why did the American planes attack the Japanese fleet in waves, rather than all at once? The video highlighted the heavy losses sustained by the intial attacking pilots as they were torn to pieces by the zeros, but it made perfect sense because each wave was only a squadron while the Japanese had over thirty fighters on their combat air patrol. In total, the Americans committed 88 carrier-based attack aircraft at a time to destroying the Japanese carriers, and it seems like it would have made far more sense for them all to arrive at once- split the enemy forces, higher density of projectiles making it difficult for the ships to evade

This is the timeline I got from Wikipedia about the first set of American strikes against the Japanese fleet in the battle on 4 June 1941:

0925: 15 torpedo bombers from the Hornet attack

0930: 14 torpedo bombers from the Enterprise attack

1000: 12 torpedo bombers from the Yorktown attack

1025: 30 dive bombers from the Enterprise and 17 dive bombers from the Yorktown attack

There is an hour between the first attack and the last attack, but the simultaneous attack at 1025 from two different carrier task forces indicates to me that they were perfectly capable of coordinating such an attack (unless it was pure coincidence), so why not do it the whole time?