Global Airship

Mode of transport late in the game that allows you to travel to nearly any location on the World Map fairly quickly. This is almost always something that flies. Often, it's far beyond the Technology Levels of the rest of the world, having been created by the resident Mad Scientist, or taken from an ancient civilization.

This is usually awarded after you've visited every part of the map in the course of the plot except one, where you will face the final Boss Battle. It allows the player to quickly access unfinished sidequests while avoiding the tedium of Random Encounters and the maze-like terrain of the World Map. Airship acquisition may also open up many hours worth of sidequests.

May fall under Cool Airship.

Rarely does media present this trope with the logical conclusion of just letting you fly a simple airplane, possibly because they may not be cool enough.

An RPG trope, especially console RPGs. See also Warp Whistle and Hub Level.

Action Adventure Games

 * Terranigma gave you an airplane for this purpose. In a nod to reality, you have to touch down at airports (which you must help create.)
 * The Donkey Kong Country series gave you an airplane also through Funky's Flights. You can only take off from Funky Kong's airports but you can land anywhere you've been before.

Adventure Games

 * About halfway through Little Big Adventure, you get to purchase your own catamaran which allows you to sail the entire southern hemisphere for free. Once reaching the northern hemisphere, you meet a flying dinosaur which will take you nearly anywhere in the northern hemisphere.
 * King's Quest VII: In a late chapter, Valanice gets a magic flute that can summon lord Tsepish's horse Necromancer, which can take her from anywhere in the game to Etheria, from where she can travel to any of the game's major locations.

Hack and Slash

 * You start with a Global Airship in Drakengard (you have a dragon, after all), but due to Convenient Questing it paradoxically doesn't matter if you can go everywhere.

Miscellaneous Games

 * Half Minute Hero pays homage to this by giving you a dragon late in the game, complete with a Mode 7 imitation effect while you're riding it.
 * The Gyrocopter in Donkey Kong Country 3, which opens up a few areas and allows you to obtain the complete ending.

MMORPGs

 * World of Warcraft has flying mounts that players at level 60 or above can purchase. Recently they have become a correct example of that trope, as now you can fly across the whole explorable world, not only Northrend and Outland.

Role-Playing Games

 * The Final Fantasy series don't share a world for the most part, but one of the recurring parallels is a character named Cid, who provides an airship in the late game.
 * ...except in Final Fantasy XII, where Balthier's airship was a prototype model scheduled to be scrapped, but he obtained it before Archades could do so. But the building of the ship itself was probably on Cid's orders.
 * Some games in the series actually provide you with an airship early in the game, but impose limitations on it (such as being unable to land in most terrain or unable to fly over mountains). Final Fantasy III actually goes through several models, ending up with a veritable behemoth of an airship complete with shop and inn, but which still can't fly over most mountains. Another type doubles as submarine and is faster, but can't pass over mountains.
 * FFXII does this too, giving you the Strahl once you escape Nalbina, but as well as not being able to control it until the endgame, it's disabled for a significant time after you go to the Tomb of Raithwall (due to a fleet exploding above it), half of the places you go you can't fly to, (the entire Southern Continent is a no-fly zone), and when you go to Archades (which requires trekking across an entire continent and can take 10+ of game time), you decline to use it because it would attract too much attention.
 * Final Fantasy VIII gives you halfway through Disc 2, which functions more like a hovercraft; towards the end of Disc 3 you get the Ragnarok, which plays the trope straight
 * The airships in Final Fantasy VI were acquired through party member Setzer. VI's Cid was a completely different, non-playable character. It's one of the few airships to suffer from a random encounter, if only one.
 * FFIII had random encounter on airships, with the assistance of the ship's cannons. This was only in select locations, however.
 * Final Fantasy X-2 has the Celsius, which is manned by Yuna's sphere hunting rival Leblanc.
 * Final Fantasy XII Revenant Wings starts you off with an absolutely massive airship. The player can custom name this airship, and it is gradually added onto throughout the game, eventually containing the "Sky Saloon" a massive market/eatery area. On top of this, as the game goes on,.
 * However, neither Final Fantasy Tactics Advance ever gives you an airship (although some do exist) and the respective Cids have nothing to do with them either. Not that it matters since you move on a static worldmap grid and random encounters are mostly avoidable.
 * Ditto on the original Final Fantasy Tactics, except that Airships are lost technology, Random encounters are rather less avoidable however, and there are times when an airship would have been nice.
 * Final Fantasy XIII averted this for the first time in the main series. The fanbase was not pleased.
 * The party doesn't make much use of them in the game due to the fact that most of the airships they find are
 * Not a ship so much, but Borderlands allows you access to the "Fast Travel Network" moderately late in the game, after you "fix" it. You can only use it to visit places you've already been (and DLC, presumably to prevent "I BOUGHT IT AND IT DOESN'T WORK" complaints), and there's a bit of Fridge Horror when you realize that, since it uses the New-U stations to teleport you around, it's really just killing you in one place and recreating you in another.
 * Chrono Trigger has the Epoch (which may be called something else), which not only can fly you to any part of the map, but can allow you to travel to any of the game's preset time periods.
 * It doesn't really get to be a Global Airship until Dalton modifies it, adding wings. Until then it's just a time machine that's rooted in place: but it's still known as the "Wings of Time" because it can fly across time but not space.
 * The car from Fallout 2 allows you to cross the map quickly, but it still leaves you vulnerable to Random Encounters and terrain.
 * Exception: Breath of Fire III ditches the standard Global Airship of the series for a series of teleporters throughout the land. It cuts down on travel time, but not by much...
 * The first Breath of Fire I had Nina's giant bird transformation instead of an airship.
 * Breath of Fire II had Nina's sister in giant bird form, or a small floating continent.
 * Common in the Tales Series. Tales of Phantasia and Tales of Symphonia had the Rheiards, and Tales of the Abyss had the Albiore. In both cases, they are important parts of the storyline and are acquired around the third of the way, far before you reach The Very Definitely Final Dungeon -- although in the Albiore's case, it had to be powered up through late-game Side Quests before it was truly able to go everywhere.
 * Tales of Vesperia also had this, with a normal sea-going ship hooked up to a flying whale.
 * Secret of Mana had a cannon-based travel agency in the early parts, but later the heroes acquired a flying white dragon as their Global Airship. The sequel, Seiken Densetsu 3, included ships, a limited cannon-travel system, and a giant sea-turtle before procuring the use of the flying white dragon which appeared in Secret of Mana.
 * The Fly HM move in the Pokémon series.
 * As many fans will affectionately point out, this move can be used by many creatures far too small to easily carry the protagonist's backpack, let alone the protagonist, or across a region of a country. Typically, Flying-type Com Mons are capable of doing so despite their initial forms being tiny (to the point that some actually have the world "tiny" in their species descriptions in the Pokédex, such as Pidgey being a Tiny Bird Pokémon and Pidove being a Tiny Pigeon Pokémon).
 * In the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic series, the player has a literal global spaceship, the Ebon Hawk, which can instantly transport the party between planets. However, there is usually no quick transportation between locations on the same planet (except for the "Return to Ebon Hawk/Transit Back" instant travel function in the first game). Also, in the first game, interplanetary travel was prone to random enemy starfighter encounters with a mandatory arcade sequence.
 * In Skies of Arcadia, which takes place on a collection of islands floating in the sky, airships are a standard method of transportation, and you literally can't go anywhere without one. The "airship effect" of avoiding random battles and getting to places quickly is achieved by obtaining an improved engine which allows travel in the upper atmosphere. Your airship doesn't start out as "global", but various upgrades allow you to reach progressively more areas of the game until you can go everywhere.
 * Final Fantasy Legend III (a SaGa game renamed for the American market) has a special airship: a time-and-dimension-travelling stealth jet of sorts called "the Talon". Repairing the Talon is the major focus of most of the game, and after the midpoint the Talon is finally back in the air, heavily equipped with Cannons, Missiles, shops, a free Inn and whatever other weapons and clever doohickeys the player can find scattered throughout the worlds.
 * In Dragon Quest VIII, the party eventually gains the ability to transform into a magic bird (collectively, it would seem) and fly about. Before this, a certain sidequest lets you obtain a bell you can use to summon a Great Sabercat to ride, enabling faster ground travel. As part of the story before obtaining the bird power, you find a magic ship that's stuck on the shoreline. After a tiresomely long series of events, the ship is finally brought onto the water, and can be used to travel across the sea. As a nice touch, all three modes of transportation (Sabercat, ship, bird) have a unique music track.
 * Same goes for Dragon Quest III, although this is explicitly the party riding a magical bird, and you can't use it for
 * Dragon Quest IV lets you obtain a hot air balloon.
 * In Dragon Quest V has first a magic carpet, then a flying castle, and eventually a dragon.
 * Dragon Quest VI the plot will eventually upgrade that will carry you around the world. Before that we get both a flying bed and a flying carpet which will also avoid any random encounters but are impeded by mountains, forests and small hills.
 * Dragon Quest VII has a ship you get early on in the game to explore the world (and which is upgraded late in the game), which is sufficient to get almost anywhere. For the remaining 1% of the world, you eventually get a flying rock that will take you there.
 * Dragon Quest IX starts with the ship, but later in the game you get to fly.
 * Lufia 2 Rise of the Sinistrals had first a boat, then a submarine -- which, while slower and underwater, did fulfill many of the same functions as an airship, namely the ability to avoid encounters and access the next areas of the game. Eventually, of course, the sub got another upgrade and was an airship as well.
 * The Gummi Ship in Kingdom Hearts starts off needing to go through a rail-shooter sequence everytime you move a space on the world map. You later get a part that lets you skip this in spaces you've already visited. The second game makes this instantly available, but also makes the Gummi sequences much more fun to play.
 * Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep has the protagonists transforming their Keyblades into their transport (Although it's not an actual, ship, per se). Gameplay-wise, it functions similarly to II's.
 * In Blue Dragon, when Zola rejoins the party shortly after you defeat the Rockwind Wolf Ghost, she arrives in a Mechat that you can then use to go anywhere you want.
 * Golden Sun: The Lost Age gives you a ship at about the one-third point, but it's a normal sea vessel, and you still have to deal with random encounters (just mermen and scallops). It's not until about two-thirds through the game that you get an airship, which is essentially the same ship you've been using with wings arbitrarily attached. You now get the option to choose to sail or fly, but while flying gets rid of random encounters, it also drains your Mana Meter constantly.
 * Even with the wings on the ship, travel across the world takes a long time. However, in the last segment of the game, travel becomes much easier with the Teleport Psynergy; conveniently, when using it to travel to a town, the ship ends up docked at the nearest beach outside said town.
 * Somewhat subverted in a rather humorous scene in Xenogears, where the party acquires a massive, high-tech flying machine, only for it to be shot down by an oblivious friend. The party gets a more permanent airship later in the game.
 * Arc the Lad has an airship in every game.
 * In the fourth game, you can call your airship for fire support during battles.
 * The Wild Arms games (the first three, at least) usually have some form of airship or flying mechanical dragon that serves the function of a Global Airship. The second game also had a flying castle at one point.
 * The first game just gave you a biplane, which fit the theme of the series much better than flying dragons.
 * Sailor Moon: Another Story has the Ark in Chapter 5, however due to the incredibly linear nature of the game, you can't really use it for anything besides advancing the plot (being in the past, there isn't really anything interesting at the places you went to in the previous chapters.)
 * You can find a balloon late in the game in {{Ultima IV, tho you typically have to wait for the wind to shift to a favorable direction.
 * Baten Kaitos Origins has the Sfida, acquired shortly after the Hassaleh chapter of the game, which can travel wherever it wants so long as 1) you've been there before or 2) the plot demands.
 * Doesn't apply to the past world, however.
 * In the first Baten Kaitos, you are given Diadem's best ship for transportation. However, you can't leave the continent that you are on once you land on it until you finish your business there, and even then you are only allowed to wrap up your questing in that continent at your leisure, as the game automatically directs your travelling towards the next continent once you do choose to leave. However, after doing a short puzzle, later the game plays this trope straight by giving you {{spoiler|The White Dragon}} to use as you see fit.
 * And it should be noted that in both games, transportation is limited to between the Floating Continents, and since there are no giant flying menaces anywhere in the sky between the continents, the use of your Global Airship is indeed limited to doing every Sidequest there is once you have it, and accessing The Very Definitely Final Dungeon.
 * Common in the Phantasy Star series.
 * In Phantasy Star III, your cyborg party member Wren becomes this when you find the right parts. You also need this to {{spoiler|access The Very Definitely Final Dungeon.}}
 * Star Ocean the Second Story At the halfway point in the game the party will set to tame a wild Synard. After taming it, it will act as a flying transport that can quickly take you to any location on Nede (except one, which is conveniently blocked off by a force field), and will avoid all random encounters.

Shoot Em Ups

 * In Star Control 2, hyperspace travel between planets is equivalent to a normal RPG's wilderness travel between towns, complete with Random Encounters. One particular alien race, if befriended, gives the player character advanced technology allowing access to a different type of hyperspace (called "QuasiSpace") where travel is faster, more fuel-efficient, and Random Encounter-free; the catch is that although you can enter QuasiSpace from anywhere, you can only leave in one of about 20 pre-defined locations, and must continue from there the normal way. One of the pre-defined locations is, naturally, right near The Very Definitely Final Dungeon.

Simulation Games

 * Tradewinds: Legends has several inland 'ports' which can only be visited by the flying dragon-ships acquired late in story mode, and are necessary to complete the plot. Unfortunately, since you are a pirate/trader captain whose entire fleet travels together, it's necessary to spend a while saving up to replace all your sailing ships with airships. And that's without even mentioning the expensive upgrades they need so they don't get instantly sunk shot down.

Wide Open Sandbox

 * In Grand Theft Auto IV, Brucie's friendship bonus is a helicopter airlift to anywhere on the map. However, the game has several other public transport options including trains and taxis, so while the chopper is a fair bit faster it's not revolutionary.
 * Similarly, the stagecoach in Red Dead Redemption.

Tabletop Games

 * Eberron has a family/guild of Airship users.