At risk of drawing the thread slightly off-topic, how common is it for private pilots to give up flying, not exactly through fear but rather through a gradual realisation that to fly is to tempt fate to a greater or lesser degree?
When I was into hang gliding, the majority of people gave up sooner or later. That went for both dabblers and people with real experience - instructors and the like. When asked, they would often be a bit cagey about what the reason was - my reading was that they looked back on their hang-gliding days fondly and so didn't like to discourage us youngsters, yet had come to a conclusion that they'd had their fill. I remember an ex-instructor who happened to be passing by, was offered a flight. He winched up a few hundred feet, flew a very small circuit, then landed. Wouldn't he like another go? A proper flight - we could get you up to 1000 feet... No, that was plenty for today, thank-you.
Quite a few professional aviators seem to have made the same decision:
After his licence was taken away, Burt Rutan said he felt a great sense of relief at the realisation that now he wouldn't be likely to die in a GA accident.
Alex Henshaw gave up flying a few years after WWII and never piloted an aircraft again.
Ernest K Gann wrote about giving up flying in 'Fate is the hunter' - though I understand that he never quite did so.
One ex-airline pilot I knew gave up GA partly for this reason, and partly because he found it very frustrating to fly so slowly.
I'd be interested to know whether a high proportion of private pilots give up for the same reason?