Mysterious plane explosions in GTA San Andreas: developer solves mystery after 20 years. Ex-Rockstar Games developer Obbe Vermeij is behind the revelation.
He worked at Rockstar from 1995 to 2009, technical director for, among other things, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. He explains that small aircraft were spawned near the player to simulate flybys. So the jets really come out of nowhere, unplanned. Crashes occur because the planes in GTA only scan very slowly when generating whether there is an object in their flight path.