Ex-Rockstar Dev Finally Explains Why Small Planes Randomly Crashed in GTA San Andreas

ign.com:

Grand Theft Auto fans who played San Andreas might be familiar with the random glitch of sorts that occasionally caused small airplanes to crash. While many believed this was deemed a myth by the community due to Rockstar Games never explaining why this happened, a former developer who worked on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has finally offered an explanation.

In a post on X/Twitter, Obbe Vermeij, who worked at Rockstar for over 10 years before departing in 2009, said issues with the planes spawning and the code itself occasionally caused the planes to perish.

In GTA San Andreas, small planes are periodically created near the player to perform a fly-by.
Sometimes they crash.

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… pic.twitter.com/8uUQcmU958

"Before creating the plane, my code looks for obstacles in its path," Vermeij explained. "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."

More interestingly, Vermeij noted that there were additional problems, revealing that planes "would sometimes lose some height" after they were generated because their "initial speed may not have generated enough lift". Additionally, when map models were not streamed in, collision would be loaded after the plane had already been created.

All these issues combined meant planes would sometimes be created on a "doomed flightpath". Vermeij disclosed he "briefly considered" removing fly-bys entirely in the final version of the game. Thankfully, Vermeij did not. While the random plane crashes caused some headaches for players, specifically if they were performing a mission that would result in an automatic fail every time the plane crashed on CJ, the plane crashes themselves have been seen as a comedic relief in the GTA