I can’t see myself getting a private pilot license.
One lady I worked with told me her dad went through and got a pilot license and never used it. A lot of money blown. His choice.
A game simulator is enough for me.
I had been flying hang gliders and ultralight aircraft years before I got my private pilot license. At that time a Cessna 150 including fuel was $25 an hour when you bought a block of ten hours. The flight instructor cost $15 an hour. I watched the “King Videos” to take my written test. They had the videos free at our local library. My instructor signed of that I was ready for the written test. The test cost $40. The requirement was that you needed 20 hours of dual and 20 hours of solo time. I had a bit more of each, but all in all it didn't cost me that much to get my license.
It would have been cheaper if my brother who was a commercial pilot and flight instructor at the time had given me my dual time. He was living in Nevada flying tours of the Grand Canyon.
I got my license specifically for the purpose of buying an airplane and using it. We bought a 1969 Piper Cherokee 140 for $17,600 and started putting a lot of time on it. It burned regular car gas which cost less than a $1 a gallon. I normally used about 6 gallons an hour on local flights and around 8 gallons an hour when going on long flights when we wanted to make better time.
Of course there have been maintenance costs, but the plane is now worth two or three times what we paid for it. Airplanes are one of the only recreational vehicles that go up in value.
Flight simulators are amazing these days especially if you use them with a VR headset. Many years ago, I took one of my coworkers flying with me. He said he had been flying our airplane in the version of MS Flight Simulator that was current at that time. He had memorized all the speeds.. for our aircraft... stall, rotation, climb out, cruise and pattern speeds for downwind base and final. I was very impressed and after I showed him what to look for on the preflight inspection I told him that I was not going to give him any more hints. He took off from our airport and flew to another about 20 miles away and landed. I handled the radio work, but he did everything else without assistance.
A Piper Cherokee is one of the easiest and safest planes to fly. It is easier to fly it in real life than in a simulator because you are able to use all of your senses in addition to the instruments.
It is much more expensive to get your license these days because of the aging and declining fleet of training aircraft. Current trainers have instrumentation that costs many tens of thousands of dollars because most people getting their licenses are hoping to get into the airlines. Then there are higher fuel costs, higher insurance costs, higher labor costs and everything else associated. I think that it now costs most people $8000 to $10,000 to get their pilot's license.