GTA San Andreas: Developer Explains Why Planes Crashed Near CJ Twenty Years Later

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is one of the most famous video games of all time. So much so, in fact, that its release in 2004 for PS2 sparked an unprecedented GTA fever, extending its legend across all manner of platforms to the present day. And it also spawned an online stream in which players shared all sorts of stories, theories, and hidden secrets, including a series of random events in which planes crashed near CJ for no apparent reason. Now, one of the game’s developers has discovered why these plane crashes were happening: a bug in the code that caused the error.

The mystery of crashed planes in San Andreas

Thus, former Rockstar Games developer Obbe Vermeij, who worked on GTA San Andreas, has explained the reasons for such a curious bug, a series of code errors that led to those erratic plane crashes that sometimes surprised the players of the title. This was explained by Vermeij himself through his account on X:

“In GTA San Andreas, small planes are periodically created near the player to perform a fly-by. Sometimes they crash,” explains the former Rockstar developer. “Before creating the plane, my code looks for obstacles in its path. It scans a number of lines in the forward direction of the plane. These scans are slow so I used the absolute minimum. (Just the body and wingtips I believe) This is why thin obstacles are sometimes not detected.”

“In addition, the planes would sometimes loose some height, right after being created because their initial speed may not have generated enough lift. There was an additional problem when map models were not streamed in yet. Their collision would be loaded after the plane had already been created. These issues would occasionally allow planes to be created on a doomed flightpath,” the programmer continues.

Eventually, Vermeij admits that he considered eliminating this series of flights because of the erratic crashes caused by his code, although he ultimately held off because of the slightest chance of it happening. But with so many hours of gameplay by millions of players, the chances of encountering such bugs increased considerably, and thus became one of the many legends surrounding the San Andreas universe.

To all of this, a developer known at X as Silent recently added that “these planes also crash more than they should due to a bug in the collision detection as planes are spawned. This can result in a false positive where the planes spawn, thinking the path in front is clear - when in reality, it’s not.”