You've no doubt heard of stalls. But in flying, stalls have nothing to do with an aircraft's engine. Here, stall refers to a loss of lift over the wings. You will learn how to recognize imminent stalls, so that you can prevent them from occurring, and how to recover from them.
The FAA requires training in full and imminent stall techniques in both the landing and departure configurations. Remember that you will practice many stalls in all stages. If you are asked to do any stall at any stage, you will have already mastered them with your instructor.
Angle of attack (AOA) is the relationship between the wing's chord line and the air through which the wing is moving. Put a simpler way, the angle of attack is the angle at which the wing meets the air or what is also know as "the relative wind."
No. Pilots are given the impression that when a specific angle of attack is reached, the entire wing stalls all at once. This is seemingly verified in flight when, during a practice stall, all lift seems to disappear suddenly. But this is not the way it works. Initially, only a small portion of the wing is stalled, not the entire wing. Most aircraft are designed with a slight twist built into the wings so that the root of the wing (the part next to the fuselage) is at a slightly higher angle of attack than the outboard portion of the wing (near the wing tip). This very subtle twist allows the root to stall first, thus allowing the pilot to maintain good airflow over the ailerons as they enter the stall. This is also called "washing out" a wing. For example, the wing twist of a Cessna 172 is 3 degrees. In other words, when the inboard section of a 172 wing is at an angle of attack of 14 degrees, the outer wing section has an angle of attack of only 11 degrees. Such a scheme forces the root to stall before the tip.
Contrary to popular belief, spins are not caused by stalls. If they were, every stall we ever attempted would wind up in a spin. The real culprit is excess yawing at the onset of stalled flight because of either excess rudder use or insufficient rudder use at the onset of stalled flight. Keep your stalls well coordinated, and you will not spin your airplane.
A spin can be described as a rapidly descending maneuver in which the airplane rotates about its vertical axis with unequally stalled wings.