Interesting thread
Even if I haven't read the whole lot.
This debate plays itself out here in Europe too.
The USA has many things in favour of GA which Europe doesn't have (cheap fuel, great utility value of GA through having many H24 airports, instrument approaches in most of them, a huge unified airspace system, no need for Customs procedures for 99.x% of GA flights, avgas everywhere, etc).
Yet the US pilot community is shrinking, and getting older.
I think the widest common issue across all this is that people are too busy doing other things these days.
Why is it that nobody realizes that students drop out when they realize how much flying costs?
The real cost of flying (as a % of average income) has probably been the same for decades.
The other factors e.g. the large dropout rate, have always been present. Here in the UK, something like 90% drop out of flying within the first year after getting their piece of paper. Loads of reasons for that, not least that many people learn to fly just to tick the "learn to fly" box. Also, loads of young people learn to fly without any regard for whether they can afford it long-term. IME, the majority of pilots are almost never seen again the day after their checkride. I have no idea how many dropped out during training.
The consensus over here (such as there is
) is that
mentoring is the most important thing. Many new pilots don't have the confidence to plan and execute a real flight from A to B. I am sure this is less the case in the USA (I did my IR in Arizona but otherwise have not flown there) than in Europe but it must still be the case a lot of the time.
Yet mentoring is very difficult, because flying schools do not like experienced pilots hanging around. They are seen to undermine the infinite knowledge and authority of the instructors, and they are likely to divert some of the school customers' sparse money towards the mentor's PPL cost sharing (not sure what it is called in the USA but I know you have a similar scheme; there is a "common purpose" test etc etc). UK AOPA has recently introduced a mentoring scheme but there are such strings attached that (together with most schools not liking it) there appear to be very few takers.
So there you are. One can propose solutions but there are always factors which frustrate them. Which is why the industry is the way it is. If it wanted change it could change. But the industry doesn't want change, because "the business model" is merely to sell training time, not to produce confident and capable pilots. If schools were paid according to post-license hours / distance / whatever flown, everything would change.
