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GTA VI launches on

The white Skimmer seaplane with its floats parked on a dirt street in Los Santos in GTA San Andreas, next to houses and palm trees.

GTA San Andreas: why Windows 11 24H2 makes the Skimmer vanish

After updating to Windows 11 24H2, the Skimmer seaplane disappears from GTA San Andreas. Microsoft isn’t to blame: it’s a 20-year-old bug in the game. How to fix it.

This article is from April 23, 2025. Some details may have changed since then.

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Playing GTA San Andreas on a PC that's been updated to Windows 11 24H2? You may have noticed the Skimmer seaplane is gone. It doesn't spawn where it should, and if you force one in with a trainer, it either rockets into the sky or freezes the game. On April 23, 2025, SilentPatch creator Silent published the explanation: Windows isn't the culprit. It's a bug that has been in the game since 2004, hidden for two decades by sheer luck.

The symptoms

Reports started in November 2024, right as Windows 11 24H2 began rolling out. The symptoms are the same with or without mods. The Skimmer doesn't spawn at its usual spots, like the pier it normally sits by. Spawn one with a trainer or script and climb in, and CJ is launched to an absurd altitude: Silent worked it out at about 10.3 octillion kilometers, over a quadrillion light-years. With SilentPatch installed, the game freezes. Without it, the screen smears into a mess of colors. On Windows 10 or Windows 11 23H2, everything works fine.

CJ in a hat and dark suit standing on an empty wooden pier over the water, where the Skimmer should be, in GTA San Andreas on Windows 11 24H2.

A seaplane that used to be a boat

The problem lives in vehicles.ide, the file that defines the game's vehicles. The Skimmer's line is missing four parameters that every other plane has, including the front and rear wheel scale.

Silent's theory makes a lot of sense. In Vice City, the Skimmer was defined as a boat, and boats don't need those values. When it became a plane in San Andreas, someone forgot to add them. And since the game rarely checks whether its data is complete, nobody noticed.

Why it worked for 20 years

Here's the fun part. When the game reads that incomplete line, the missing values aren't filled in with anything: they keep whatever was already sitting in that bit of memory. By pure coincidence, that happened to be the values from the previous vehicle in the file, a van with perfectly sensible wheels. The Skimmer had been running on borrowed wheels all along.

Windows 11 24H2 changed how an internal system mechanism (critical sections) works, and the new version uses a little more temporary memory. That extra memory overwrites the borrowed values, the Skimmer gets garbage numbers, and its collision box ends up with a ridiculous height.

The distorted Skimmer floating against a yellow and white background after being launched to an absurd altitude in GTA San Andreas.

Silent is clear that this isn't a Windows bug. How the system uses its internal memory can change at any time, and the fault lies with the game for relying on behavior nobody ever promised. The margin was razor-thin, too: even on Windows 10, the system already overwrote the value right next to it. The game was 4 bytes away from breaking years earlier.

How to fix it

You have two options:

  1. Update SilentPatch: Silent added a fix that fills in the missing parameters with sensible defaults.
  2. Edit vehicles.ide by hand: add , -1, 0.7, 0.7, -1 to the end of the Skimmer's line (vehicle 460). Back up the file first.

Our take

This is a perfect example of why old games "break" on new systems: often the bug has been there since day one, kept hidden by luck. It also shows the value of projects like SilentPatch, which don't just fix these problems but document them in more detail than most studios give their own games. Silent would later return to San Andreas with the patch's biggest update yet, turning this fix into a general safeguard for any incomplete line.