There is no doubt that costs have skyrocketed just in a few years. I joined a flying club in 2004 and was paying $33/hour WET for a C152!!!! Now it costs $58/hour wet( which still is a steal) almost doubling what I paid 4 years ago. Unfortunately I moved to another state for college and am stuck trying to pay a minimum of $90/hour for anything else.

Not that I believe in conspiracies or anything, but on a separate forum awhile back I was reading somewhere that 100LL is pretty much still around just because companies know that they can make a decent profit off of it because so many small airplanes require it. And honestly, many airplanes have been STC'd to use autofuel which is now half as expensive as 100LL. There are several issues with this though: Many operators believe that autofuel is kind of a cheap and not necessarily healthy fuel to be putting through their engines. However, from some material that I have read and comments Ive seen on other forums, autofuel in many cases has shown to be a better fuel than 100LL because it will often improve compression quite a bit. The other issue though is that it is becoming harder and harder to find autofuel without ethanol in it, which is prohibited in most cases for use in airplanes that have autofuel stc's. Lastly, not too many airports have autofuel pumps located on the field. Obviously if you are adventurous you could always go to your local gas station and fill up a bunch of tanks .