It's not just getting IMCs, it's continuing to fly only in the way which you flew during the PPL course, with the emphasis on unchallenging trips to unchallenging airfields, shuttling from VOR to VOR and so forth. It has always struck me as odd that most people who learn to drive do not continue to drive the car they learn in, or limit their journeys to the roads they learned on, whilst many who learn to fly are content to do the flying equivalent of taking the Nissan Micra around the quiet housing estate at 28 mph for most of their flying career.
It can't just be money: as has been pointed out here and elsewhere, you can, with a little imagination, obtain an interesting hour's flying for the same cost as an hour's rental of the club Cessna.
Does the phenomenon which Aerobatic Flyer observes originate, at least partly, in the fact many of the average PPL's instructors themselves know of no other type of flying than that which they teach and demonstrate? This is not a gratuitous dig at hour building instructors: they have understandable career aspirations, but there appears to be something in the culture of the "typical" flying school which results in things such as strip-flying seeming to be strange and difficult. It may be true also that there can appear to be a certain exclusive CAMRA-beardiness associated with certain aspects of grass roots, straw in teeth, wind in hair flying which might put some people off.
Hairyplane (I think it was Hairyplane) [edit: nope, it was Shaggy Sheep Driver, see below] commented in a thread a while back that he had the good fortune to be taught to fly by ex WW2 free spirits. Not many of those guys have held onto their instructor ratings (although some of them can still fly your trousers off: as I found out when I handed over control to an 80 year old Spitfiire guy during last year's Project Propeller), but they have their successors dotted around. It's such a pity that the job of flying instructor is so undervalued and poorly rewarded, so that so many who do it are merely en route to somewhere else, and may have neither the time nor the inclination to open up for their students the various facets of recreational flying.
Last edited by FNG; 12th Feb 2003 at 15:14.