Today we went out in the Duchess at around 3pm, flew north from Bournemouth to an area just south of Salisbury, and practiced stalls and steep turns, or in pilot parlance, 'general handling' for an hour.
A stall is the condition where the aircraft wings can no longer fly. It occurs at a certain speed (the stall speed) but is primarily caused by an excessive angle of attack (the angle that the airflow hits the wing). Here is a picture to demonstrate:
Once the wing is stalled, with all that turbulent airflow, there is no lift and so the aircraft tends to go down rather quickly. The pilot must either unstall the wings, or suffer what we call 'severe ground effect'. If a stall is handled badly it can develop into a spin, which if also handled badly might hasten the onset of severe ground effect, but this time with dizziness.
So in order to ensure that I become a really good, safe pilot, we practiced recovery from the fully developed clean stall, the incipient approach stall (gear down and 20 degree flap, in a turn) and the incipient landing stall (gear and full flap) several times. Phew!
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