Brian -

I think it is important to know what to expect if your plane stalls, and how to recover from it.  I don't think it's necessary to let the stall progress to a "deep stall" or, more likely, a spin.  The important thing is to become familiar with the warning signs and also, to turn the recovery actions into instinctive behavior.

Those who know me will tell you that I'm a pretty conservative pilot.  However, one day I was flying a glider 1200 feet above the ground and trying to center a thermal.  I was fairly close to the airport and nobody else was flying, so I was positioned to enter the pattern at the customary 1000 feet.  At one point I realized that I had just passed the center of the thermal and I needed to tighten my turn, so I did.  I yanked back a little too hard and a fraction of a second later I was looking straight at the ground.  I remember noticing that cornstalks looked very unusual from that perspective...

Okay, it's a classic accelerated stall.  Unload -- a momentary rush as you feel yourself being ejected from the seat until the straps catch you -- then recover.  It was totally instinctive and I only lost 100 feet altitude, and entered the pattern normally (and immediately).

This instinctive recovery reaction came from lots of stall practice in powered airplanes.  To me, that's a good enough reason to practice them.

- Rob Wolf