I've never personally been into sailing, but anybody who thinks flying is expensive should try a bit of sailing, and not necessarily at the "gin palace" level. In fact, just popping into a boat shop and looking at the fuel flow rate of something that will get you from the UK to Jersey before you grow a beard will be quite a revelation! It may be "cheaper" diesel but it will make your eyes water to realise how many people spend £10,000 on fuel on a little powerboat jolly. Mind you, the swimsuit scene is probably a whole lot better than in GA
I've said this before and got into hot water for it, but IMV the money is not the problem. Money (or lack of it) will determine whether somebody can (or can't) play in this game, but the cost of playing doesn't have much of an impact on whether (or how soon) people chuck it in.
What matters is the
return you get, relative to the considerable hassle which aviation always carries with it.
IMV there are not all that many ways to maximise the return v. hassle ratio. One can aim to go places (which is why I learnt in the first place) or one can do aerobatics. There may be other effective ways but they escape me.
Certainly, anybody who thinks they will hang in there on self fly hire of some spamcan once or twice per month, to do a local bimble, is kidding themselves. He will be spending say £2000/year and all he will be getting is a bit of aerial view. After a bit, that gets boring. Yet, this is all a typical new product of the PPL training machine feels able to do - no wonder most pack it in more or less right away.
That's why I would advise anybody who enjoys flying to make a decent committment early on, and either buy their own plane or buy into a syndicate, get flying with other (experienced) pilots, and get firmly established in the process of learning how to go beyond the WW1 PPL syllabus. Do some real flying and leave the airport anorak scene behind (your partner will be rather grateful for that, too).
One also needs to work on hassle reduction and a purchase (outright or share) will help there too. You get better access to a better maintained machine.
Unless you are lucky to get a decent instructor, the PPL sausage machine will not help you. It has no business brief to turn out pilots; the #1 job is to get £8000 or whatever off everybody walking through the door. They also don't usually like people who have become experienced pilots hanging around - they might teach the new recruits "bad habits"... they also try to talk people out of committing early because they want you to keep self fly hiring their old heaps.
You have to get the basic training and the paperwork and then leave it all behind and move on.
And yes it can't be done for much less than a few k a year, if you want decent passenger carrying capability. It can be done for perhaps half that if you zoom around in an ultralight/LSA type but to me that seems a rather more lonely sort of flying.
Many people have thought about some kind of
mentoring for new pilots. This is a great idea and I would very much like to do that too. I fly at least once a week and a lot of the time it's just a local flight for currency, so why not turn it into something worthwhile? However, many aircraft owners, myself included, can't do this except in the most discreat manner if there is a school at their airport; you soon get into conflict with the thick airport politics and losing one's hangarage etc (or worse) is just not worth it. You could do it only with pilots who have well and truly departed their school but most of those have already left the scene for good...