How come a driving instructor can earn a good living, but a flying instructor cannot.
The answer must be that there is a demand for driving lessons at the price they have to go for, but there isn't a demand for flying lessons at the price they have to go for.
And as an aircraft owner I know about operating costs and I know that there isn't much one can do about most of them.
Most people think that if there is a shortage of something then its price must rise until the demand drops enough to make the shortage go away. This principle holds up in most normal business but it fails where the demand is capped by some other factor.
In PPL training, the demand is capped to the number of people in a given radius interested in learning to fly. Yet the industry continues to live in the 1960s/1970s heyday and every airfield that isn't tightly run seems to have more than one school based there.
This is completely pointless. An airfield cannot have a catchment area that can support more than one decent school. The airfield where I learnt had eight fixed wing schools at the time; now it's a bit fewer (some went bust in a manner which was spectacular even by the industry standard, with massive internal fraud) but still there are several times more than there ever will be customers for.
It's of course trendy to say "we welcome competition" but in reality the only businesses who can afford competition are those with loads of unfulfilled demand, and there is no such thing in PPL training.
The demand will always be sucked dry by well wishing people who are willing to work for nothing out of a wooden hut.
One could do things locally if one had control of the airfield (via issuing leases banning new flight training operations) and had a great catchment area, but here isn't any easy way to increase that all around the UK.