But anyone doubting how much money there is needs only to stand next to the M25 and count the £40k+ cars driven by under-40 year olds. Just 1% of that money would transform GA.
People with as much money as you are talking about are a tiny, tiny minority. Probably a disproportionate number have a reason to drive around the M25 of a weekday: people in high-paid sales jobs, people on their way to Heathrow to fly away for business, people who live in the Home Counties and work in central London. (etc.)
Such people (and I'll wager IO540 is one, and many others on this forum) tend to associate with one another and forget they form a tiny microcosm, mainly in the SE.
But wanting to fly and having the financial ability to fly are still mutually exclusive in essence (though there are reasons to do with personality that link them a bit I suppose).
I remember someone on this forum last year marvelling that anyone on the national average wage (£511 p/w for men, £382 p/w for women as of April) can fly. Needless to say, this depressed me!
The old one costs less in financing but one spends the "saved" money on a constant stream of "little suprises" and the occassional big one.
But if you can't afford the new one in the first place, what choice do you have? To put up with it, or to quit.
FWIW, I think more people embark upon a PPL with the idea of going pro eventually than we might think. They then give up at some stage on all that. If this wasn't the case, maybe we'd have a greater number of (and more high-profile) microlight and gliding clubs?? There's no microlight Cabair, after all!
Dunno.
