A former developer at Rockstar North, the studio behind the immensely popular Grand Theft Auto franchise, has revealed the reasons why sometimes planes in GTA: San Andreas would just randomly crash near the player. He also provided some insight into why a particular NPC in the game would take a photo and then walk off a cliff to their death.

Late last year, former Rockstar North developer Obbe Vermeij posted some fascinating blogs chronicling the development of past GTA games and the original Manhunt. These write-ups are filled with interesting insights and details on how these video games were created. But Vermeij later deleted the posts voluntarily. Since then, he’s been posting similar details on Twitter about how games like GTA: San Andreas and Vice City were developed, and his most recent posts pull back the curtain on two fan-favorite myths.

First up, on April 2, Vermeij shared a lengthy but informative post on Twitter explaining why planes in San Andreas will, seemingly for no reason, fall out of the sky, crash, and then explode near the player. If you’ve played San Andreas long enough, you’ve likely encountered this at least a few times. It’s also famously caused problems in speedruns.

According to Vermeij’s post, the developers wanted to have small planes periodically fly by the player. He created some code that would look for obstacles in the path of a plane before it spawned. However, to save time he only scanned a small section in front of part of the plane. This means that sometimes tall, thin objects are missed and planes fly into these trees or power poles and crash. And because the game is trying to spawn these planes near the player, you are always close to these random crashes.

Vermeij further explained that sometimes these spawned “fly-by” planes would lose some height when spawned at the incorrect speed. There were also some issues with how the map streamed in buildings and other large models. Sometimes the plane would be created before a large mountain or tower had appeared, meaning the plane was spawned with a “doomed flightpath.”

“I was aware of the crashes and briefly considered removing the fly-by’s altogether,” added Vermeij.

However, thankfully he didn’t, and these odd planes have led to numerous funny moments in speedruns, let’s plays, and random sessions in San Andreas. I know I once had