Since the start of commercial aviation, many airlines have arranged to have their planes displayed prominently in movies. This form of advertising is called product placement. Airlines hope that being displayed in movies will attract new business by increasing their mind share among their target market and by portraying a glamorous image.

This product placement provides an additional source of income for movie houses. If no airline has paid the producer's fees in order to feature in the movie, a producer will either use a fictional airline name, film aircraft landing or departing, possibly without revealing the plane's livery, or only use interior cabin or cockpit views. When an airline has paid to be shown, its name will be prominently shown during appropriate parts of the movie.

Among the airlines seen prominently in different movies are:

• Aeroflot (in The Bourne Supremacy)
• Aerolíneas Argentinas (in many Jorge Porcel movies)
• Aeroméxico (in many Mexican movies)
• Air Canada (in French Kiss)
• Air France (in Airport '79: The Concorde and Kiss of the Dragon. The livery was changed for Airport 79, but you can tell the plane is from Air France. At the beginning of the movie the Concorde is being delivered from Paris to the new owners in the USA. Also, in one scene the registration F-BTSC can clearly be seen on the tail.)
• Air India (numerous Bollywood movies recently Swades.)
• Air Panama (in a movie starring Venezuelan music group Los Chamos)
• America West (in When a Man Loves a Woman, Andy Garcia played an America West pilot)
• American Airlines (in High Crimes, Home Alone, Home Alone 2, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Passport to Paris, Stuck on You)
• British Airways (in Bend It Like Beckham, Die Another Day, A Fish Called Wanda, GoldenEye, Mission Impossible, The Parent Trap, Three Men and a Baby)
• Cayman Airways (in The Firm)
• Cubana de Aviacion (in The Godfather Part II)
• Delta Airlines (in Deception)
• Eastern Airlines (in Almost Famous, Una Aventura LLamada Menudo, Ernest Saves Christmas, "Heartburn", although the airline's planes being shown in Almost Famous cannot be considered successful advertising since by the release date Eastern was bankrupt)
• Hamburg Airlines (in Bend It Like Beckham)
• Hawaiian Airlines (in A Very Brady Sequel)
• Horizon Air (in Georgia)
• Hughes Airwest (in The Gauntlet, Black Girl)
• Lufthansa (in The Lizzie McGuire Movie, XXX)
• Mexicana (in The Mexican)
• Northwest Airlines (in Bridget Jones's Diary, The Firm, Deception)
• Oceanair (in Coneccion Caribe)
• Olympic Airways (in Summer of Love)
• Pan Am (in many movies, including Catch Me If You Can, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory)
• Qantas ( "Welcome to Woop Woop", "Rain Man")
• Singapore Airlines (in Black Ninja)
• TWA (in Back to the Beach, Dumb and Dumber, Funny Face, Great Balls of Fire, Rocky III, Rocky IV, Salsa, Woman In Red)
• Tower Air (in Liar Liar, Turbulence)
• United Airlines (in The Karate Kid Part 2, The Terminal, 13)
• Virgin Atlantic (in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Wayne's World)
• Western Airlines (in Commando)

If the film script requires an aircraft to crash or explode, there is less likelihood that a real airline will want to be associated with it and a fictitious name, livery and airline call sign are most likely employed. It is also interesting to note that airlines will rarely use a film which involves - or even mentions - an air crash as an in flight movie, or will edit it out. For instance, in the film Get Shorty a brief scene showing a plane crash was replaced with footage of a train crash.

In cheaper or less professionally directed films it is common to see characters depart in one type of airliner and arrive in another, or to depart and arrive at the same airport, even though the script implies that they are travelling elsewhere. Low budget films will often exhibit a discontinuity between the aircraft seen and the soundtrack heard, as producers simplistically assume that all jets sound the same. Unfortunately a film can soon look dated if a real airline features prominently, because that airline may collapse, change its livery or merge with another. One notable example of this was 2001: A Space Odyssey which contained references to Pan Am spaceflights, although the actual Pan Am went bankrupt in the 1990's. Perhaps that is why landings and departures are often filmed from a position near to the centreline of a runway, which makes the external livery of the aircraft less obvious to the audience.