Landing Gear Shot

Any time the action of a show switches geographical location to the other side of the country or the globe, a quick shot of an airliner touching down on a runway can be spliced in.

Presumably this is so the geographically inept in the audience understand that Los Angeles isn't just down the road from New York, and that Berlin or Cairo are even farther than that. Lazy editors can make this even worse by using Stock Footage of a plane that's no longer in commercial service, or painted for an airline that's since gone defunct.

Examples of Landing Gear Shot include:

Film

• In Snatch when Cousin Avi travels from New York to London, and again when he returns to New York. Both times, the footage is part of a brief montage of the whole trip, including a passport getting stamped and Avi downing a drink on the plane.
• Parodied in Wayne's World 2, which goes even further by having the footage of a flying plane mirrored to show that it was going back to America. (You can tell because the writing on the plane is backwards.)
  • Not to mention that the plane wasn't even real. It was a toy. Look closely and you can see a wire holding it up.
• Parodied in Freaked, where the plane explodes on touchdown. Luckily the main characters took an earlier flight.
• Even the James Bond films have done this one.
• Everett from Cars 2.

Live Action TV

• MacGyver did this one when a villain went to Paris.
• Given that The Amazing Race is a race around the world, it uses this trope all the time when using planes.
• Happens several times in Destinos: An Introduction To Spanish.
• Pan Am can have this several times an episode. Understandable given the setting of the show.