as long as we held 75knots / -700ft/m, there was no way the C172 was ever going to stall.
I'm just checking whether there's been a time slip and we're back to the 1st of this month.
Are you being serious? Of course the thing isn't going to stall if you're just sitting there simulating an approach
. I don't know who I find more ridiculous; you for doing such a thing or your instructor for watching you and not asking, "what the hell are you doing?"
It's stalling in the approach CONFIGURATION i.e. with the gear, prop pitch and flaps set up as if you're landing........and then you stall the aircraft in that CONFIGURATION, just like you'd stall any other time. To properly simulate the configuration, you leave some power on and then just fly level or slightly nose up to avoid being there all day (you can pretend to be stretching the approach), let it stall and recover. You don't let it descend at 700 feet per minute or guess what doesn't happen.
You can call it 'stalling with flap' if you like because you're not (normally) going to be altering the gear or prop pitch in a 172 but it's still in the approach configuration and is a term so often used I find it very difficult to believe you've never heard of it before.
Yes, a spade is called a spade.