I think it's very easy for all those who spend their days and nights
on pilot forums to make sweeping judgements about other pilots.
Yes, everybody reading pprune, or any of the countless other pilot forums that load up the internet with varying degrees of success, ought to know about
www.ais.org.uk.
But let me tell you that in my 600+ hrs of flying over 5 years I have almost never heard of internet weather and have never heard of getting notams via the internet or through any other means. In training, the instructor would pin a fax with some local notams to the noticeboard and that was it. It was only through reading some pilot forums back in 2001/2002 that I discovered these great resources.
About 3000 PPLs get dished out every year. The CAA (probably very sensibly) doesn't release the total # of nonexpired PPLs but it's thought to be of the order of 20000. It's also known that 80-90% of PPLs don't make it past the first renewal.
So, we have a lot of PPLs which expire more or less right away, and I don't suppose those pilots feature very much in infringements.
Based on the known average PPL award age of about 40, and the likely age before a holder fails his CAA Class 2 medical, we have a much larger population of pilots who have been flying for say 10-30 years. These people may be hanging around at flying schools or clubs but a lot of them (I can't guess how many but it must be the majority**) are flying entirely outside any training environment.
This last group will see an instructor every two years (and this itself is quite a recent thing). Often it will be an old pub mate of theirs who will sign them off without much formality. But this instructor, being most likely a member of the old school, won't know about internet notams or internet weather or internet anything, or indeed anything that's happened since WW2.
There is another group which flies entirely outside the training system: the private IR pilots. Many of these did their stuff in the USA, and they cringe at the thought of hanging around a flying school where some sanctimonious airport bar pilot will tell them to not use a GPS. However, these people are pretty modern, have all the gadgets and use them, and they will very rarely find themselves somewhere unexpected. Hard to do anyway when being vectored by London Control
The few of these who are on G-reg and thus receive GASIL or GASCO toss those old rags straight in the bin.
It's the people that got their PPL years ago and are outside the system but who fly at a low activity level who are most likely to get into this kind of trouble, and it's no use pontificating that they are dickheads, etc. They are just victims of the substandard PPL training system - just like I was when I dropped out of it 5 years ago.
Finally we have which I might call the pure sport flying group. I don't want to suggest I have anything against microlights but the general level of aviation professionalism there seems to be even lower than in the PPL(A). A lot of these people can't navigate if you paid them for it, and I doubt they were ever trained to get notams any more than PPL(A)s.
(** most schools don't like PPL holders to hang around; they prefer students to spend all their precious money on lessons, not subsidising some PPL's cost sharing scheme
)