Highlights

  • Random plane crashes in GTA: San Andreas have puzzled players for nearly two decades.
  • A former Rockstar employee has confirmed that this phenomenon is not an intentional feature, but a result of some problematic code.
  • The developer outlined four flaws in the game's logic that could all lead to crashes in certain scenarios.

Plane crashes that are commonly encountered throughout Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas stem from some problematic code that is both buggy and imperfect, partially due to the technical limitations of the game's original target hardware. This information, shared by a former Rockstar developer, finally offers a solution to a mystery that has been puzzling GTA: San Andreas players for nearly two decades.

One of the many weird encounters throughout the Grand Theft Auto series is the case of the mysterious crashing plane. While not necessarily exclusive to GTA: San Andreas, it is particularly common in the 2004 game, to the point that many people who play it to relative completion will encounter it multiple times, especially in the Las Venturas area.

GTA 3 Flames Per Second Unreal Engine 5 remake concept Kuruma driving across rainy Bedford Point Times Square screenshot
Related
Grand Theft Auto 3 Modder Shows How the Game Would Look With an Unreal Engine 5 Remake

A highly skilled modder shares a stunning concept video envisioning what a GTA 3 remake using Unreal Engine 5 could look like.

GTA: San Andreas Plane Crashes Are Partially a Result of 2004 Hardware Limitations

Former Rockstar developer Obbe Vermeij has finally shed some light on this curiosity in a recent social media update. The developer, who worked on GTA: San Andreas as a technical director, confirmed that the plane crashes weren't an intentional feature, but that they also cannot be categorized as a simple bug. He has instead characterized the phenomenon as a result of some flawed code responsible for spawning planes to perform flybys near the player.

Due to the technical constraints of the 2004 hardware, the logic itself was rudimentary. Specifically, while the code was meant to ensure there were no obstacles in the plane's path before spawning it, such checks were so costly that Vermeij opted to use "the absolute minimum," which resulted in the safeguards often not detecting thin obstacles that the plane would collide with, causing it to crash. The game would also occasionally spawn a plane without enough initial momentum to maintain its altitude, causing it to drop below its precalculated flight path, hit an obstacle, and go down.

4 Reasons For GTA: San Andreas Plane Crashes

  1. Rudimentary flight path verification fails to account for thin obstacles.
  2. A plane gets spawned without enough momentum to maintain altitude and stay on its precalculated safe path.
  3. Map models and their collision detection get loaded after the plane itself.
  4. A bug in flight path verification results in a false positive.

A separate problem occurred in scenarios when map models and their collision detection were loaded after the plane, which would lead to the same outcome. Twitter user @__silent_ even found a bug in the game's recently leaked code that would result in false positives, which Vermeij has subsequently acknowledged as the fourth potential cause of plane crashes that he wasn't even aware of 20 years ago.

A plethora of gameplay footage from the critically panned Definitive Edition of GTA: San Andreas that is available online confirms that these problems have persisted in the 2021 HD remaster. Vermeij revealed he had considered removing the flybys altogether during the original game's development due to the issue, but ultimately decided against it. While there is no shortage of social media reports that indicate GTA 5 planes can also occasionally crash, that particular phenomenon appears to be much rarer, and it's unclear whether its origin is similar to that of its San Andreas counterpart.