GTA San Andreas' random plane crashes explained

If you've played GTA San Andreas long enough, you've definitely noticed random plane crashes around the map. Some aircraft will seemingly crash into tall buildings out of nowhere, and if you're unlucky enough, one might fall right on top of you. You can even hear distant explosions sometimes, the source of which is these random plane crashes.

These suicidal aircraft have been reported to be a thing in GTA 5 as well, but that's a mystery for another time. For now, the riddle behind the random plane crashes in GTA San Andreas seems to have been solved as former Rockstar North technical director Obbe Vermeij has explained why it happens.

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Former Rockstar dev explains random plane crashes in GTA San Andreas

Obbe Vermeij has been revealing a lot of behind-the-scenes facts about the development of the past Grand Theft Auto games. In an earlier post, he had revealed how the mirrors in GTA San Andreas were made using an interesting trick. His latest post explains the random plane crashes in GTA San Andreas.

According to him, the planes will occasionally spawn near the player to perform fly-bys. The code checks for any obstacles in the plane's path before spawning it, scanning a few lines in the front of the aircraft. Since the scans were slow, Vermeij chose to keep it to a bare minimum, which likely included the body and wingtips.

The result was that thin obstacles ended up not getting detected by these scans and this is what caused the collisions. Sometimes, the planes would lose altitude after spawning as their starting speed might not have been enough to generate lift. A further issue arose when map models were not yet streamed in, as the plane would already be spawned before their collision was loaded.

All these issues contributed to the random plane crashes in GTA San Andreas, which Vermeij says he was aware of. However, thanks to his decision not to remove the fly-by system from the game, we get to experience these hilarious suicidal aircraft in the game, sometimes crashing in the most unexpected moment.

Now, a few X users asked what caused some of these spawned aircraft to drop vertically instead, as demonstrated in a hilarious video in the post above.

Vermeij explained that this was due to a bug:

"The little planes are told to fly at a certain height. (ie 30 meters). Obviously the crop-duster shouldn't have been created that high in the sky. That's a bug. But when it does, it will do a nosedive to get back to the assigned height."

Popular GTA modder Silent also replied to Vermeij's post, notifying him of a bug that the developer wasn't aware of. He pointed out that the collision detection system issued a false positive after scanning the front path of the spawned aircraft, which is why these random plane crashes are so common in the first place.

Most GTA San Andreas players over the years have found this bug entertaining rather than being annoyed by it. Surprisingly, there's a similar thing GTA 5 players have found where a suicidal airplane will crash after spawning near the player.