It seems to me that some here are confusing the requirements of a "qualifying cross country flight" and the definition of "cross country".
Ok, my 2 cents:
Any contact with earth is a landing.
A good landing is, where you could walk away from.
A great landing is, when you could use the aircraft again.
For the qualifying solo cross country flight during license training, a given distance has to be flown between the airfields, and you have to land there (I had to get stamps from "C", meaning to shut the engine down and leave it).
With your license in the pocket, a cross country flight is anything out of visibility of the traffic pattern. A landing is not necessary.
Otherwise, taking off in Berlin, Germany, flying a sight seeing tour to the Baltic Sea and going back for the landing to Berlin would count as "local". Sounds strange.
And: Flight time is the time where no part of the aircraft touches ground.
Time between rotors starting to turn and rotors ending to turn, is called "block time" or "PIC time". So a usual flight in a H300 has about 5 minutes of block time before (engaging clutch, checking magnetos, checking free wheeling unit, contacting tower) and also 5 minutes of block time after air time (cooling down, shutting down).
That's how I count it
Thracian