Whirly
Technically, what you say is of course correct. One can go everywhere on dead reckoning. One can go everywhere VFR. I know of a man who flew to Katmandu VFR, in a C150 I think.
But it's a whole lot easier to get in a car and drive around East Anglia. In fact driving from A to B in East Anglia - or most parts of the UK - is almost certainly quicker than flying, on a door to door basis.
How many people are going to spend £100/hr to fly around the same old barns? Just like one's local instructors, one soon gets to know the sheep by their first names
For most PPLs, flying is a leisure activity. (It has to be, really, because planning flights in advance on a plain PPL is a dead loss).
So, what keeps people hanging in any leisure activity?
Continued interest I would say.
Only the most determined anorak is going to fly around East Anglia for very long - regardless of how great the social scene is at the club. And rest assured that with that many anoraks around, the social scene won't be all that great. There will be few if any girlz, which leaves exactly what? Beer?
So one has to find a way to make venturing further afield easy and interesting. France is only 1-2hrs away from most of Southern UK, 2-3hrs away from most of the rest. One can't drive there very quickly either.
Now try navigating around France, with its extensive military airspace, TRAs, you name it, on map reading. It isn't like the UK, where you can fly, NO RADIO, anywhere where flying isn't actually prohibited. Most of France is prohibited, different bits at different times at different levels. But it's easy to fly there - the key is knowing for sure where one is.
I know of a number of pilots who have given up not because of lack of money or lack of time. They gave up because they didn't have the confidence to fly to the more interesting places. The way flying is taught in the UK, fresh PPLs come out with nowhere near enough confidence to go somewhere for real. A lot of them (probably a lot of the smarter ones) pack it in. A lot of the others get some press coverage
http://www.flyontrack.co.uk/comm.asp...71&orderby=ASC
of which at least 99% must be completely avoidable.
This is like a broken record too.