You won't get two replies the same but here's mine.
I love flying, and have done 300+ hrs in 2 years.
But I really hated the training. The crap planes (all of them), crap instructors (not all but a lot of them), crap organisation (all of them), crap timekeeping (all of them), schools letting walk-in trial lessons from the local council estate push a long booked lesson out (pretty common), and of course the UK weather. It took a year and I would have to think very hard to recommend an instructor to someone who is a friend.
Then, flying around was just great. Still in the crap planes but one could at least choose. One can also get into a syndicate operating something a lot better.
It also became pretty obvious just a few hours into the training that an IMC Rating would be essential for going places, so I did that too. That transformed going to places in the UK, reducing the % of pre-planned flights scrapped on the day due to weather from perhaps 50% to 10%, and if your destination is a large place with an ILS that number could be even lower.
Now I am doing an IR, dead handy for European flying in less than sure weather.
Flying is a fantastic privilege. I just wish the "business" got a bit better organised and then it could attract people with some money, which, assuming decent management, might lift things up a bit. But most of it is stuck well and truly in a rut dating back to WW1, being run by traditionalists who believe that the initiation ceremony for a proper pilot with a hairy chest is 50 hours in a 2ft wide 1960s bent up coke can (a great fringe benefit for the instructor if the student is female, incidentally), and their anoraks with epaulettes, their stupid slide rules, horrid tales about GPS failures... did I leave anything out? Oh yes, the general difficulty in finding somebody in any general aviation related business who can be trusted.
I own a nice plane now so have relative independence and like to take PPL students up on occassions, to show them it's a whole different world up there, and how much easier flying, especially with GPS and other types of radio navigation, is in reality.
Regards UK weather, this is the worst time of the year. Proper cold winter days are a lot better. Summer is usually best of course (especially for trips into Europe) once you are flying yourself, but the frequent hazy days mess up lessons and solo flights for PPL students, causing much frustration.
