A landing zone (or LZ) is a space where helicopters can land to deploy or extract troops. In Vietnam, when they needed an LZ, they would deploy items such as fuel-air bombs and Agent Orange to clear out large circles of vegetation. This allowed the helicopters to land without hitting any trees.


Another use for the term landing zone concerns hard drives. Older drives that relied on stepper motors required the heads to be parked. The area on the drive that was used to park the head became known as the landing zone or parking cylinder. This procedure placed the heads on an unused area of the drive, away from data. This helped to reduce the danger of data loss if the drive was accidently bumped.

Newer drives use voice-coil actuators with self-parking heads. You no longer have to run a parking program before shutting down your computer.