So How do I skip the flying missions in San Andreas?

Vertical Bird.
Actually the EASIEST way to deal with this mission is to blow up the other 2 planes on the carrier. I had some leftover demo packs from an earlier mission.
After taking off, you can adjust the nozzles so that you can actually fly backwards from the carrier. Do this, when the lone fighter comes to shoot you down, hold down spacebar I think it was to get a lock on, and shoot it down.
The rest of the mission is pretty easy after that. Hover and blast the boats, then fly back to base.

Learning to fly was sheer idiocy though. It’s Grand Theft Auto, not Grand Theft AIRPLANE.
It didn’t help that you were in one of the more agile airplanes in the game.
Flight school in a Dodo would have been easy.

There is a cheat to complete missions…byixziy … try it…on some missions it wont work but works on many missions…and in flying lessons, be careful to type it on the mission selection page


Good luck

Interesting thread. I had no idea people had trouble with the flying missions. I don’t even remember that part (and I finished the game). The first clue really came mid-thread when @Sharpe mentioned buying a logitech controller so he could try it using a controller. Aha! It all makes sense now. This is before the time when PC games had good controller support probably. And he was trying to get through the flying missions using mouse and keyboard, most likely. That does sound hard!

Whoa.

Yes, I suck at flying. I am terribad at it. It killed San Andreas for me, sadly, which up until that point was shaping up to be the best GTA-type game evar (a crown now worn by Saint’s Row IV in my view.)

I sometimes think about trying GTA San Andreas again but… the flying man, the flying.

Edit: it’s been 15 years and yet the hate of San Andreas flying is still strong with me.

I tried the drone mission in San Andreas with kbm and it was totally impossible. It made me put down the game, in fact, because I was a compulsive completionist back then.

It was a lot harder to learn in San Andreas than in Vice City. I remember trying and trying but being encouraged by James Woods’s harassing phone calls (“Learn to fly, Carl!”), which made me think the difficulty was built into the game story…And suddenly I was able to do it. Not from figuring anything out, just suddenly. I didn’t know if my brain had just taught itself or whether the game had changed the difficulty after a certain amount of trying.

Anyway, don’t skip missions in games — what kind of candy-ass are you?

I gave up on Vice City because of that RC Helicopter mission. Just couldn’t complete it. That was on PC with mouse/keyboard, it probably is easier with a controller.

Is that the mission where you fly a helicopter through a construction site to drop bombs or something like that? I got through it after God knows how many failures, but should have taken it as a sign to quit because later flight mission were even more annoying and I eventually gave up.

It’s remarkable how GTA games are so polished and still so badly made they leave people angry for decades after playing them.

Preach brother.

I feel the pain of both the San Andreas plane mission and that Vice City RC copter mission. Your post reached back 17 years in memory and the pain was still fresh.

There are so many missions in SA where they are asking you to do things that the engine/mechanics just suck at, it’s pretty infuriating. The missions where you have to follow someone at high speed and hit certain story beats at just the right time, coupled with the RNG nature of whatever car plowing into you, still gives me nightmares.

I don’t remember any friction with the game mechanics, not for this one. But it’s been such a long time, I’m willing to concede that it might have been there for me as well. What I remember is using the bicycle to explore LA. And then the map opening up and using a mountain bike to explore that tall mountain north of LA. And then the map opening up and doing a whole bunch of missions in San Francisco. And then the map opening up and doing a whole series of missions up in Las Vegas, including spending long, long hours gambling on the strip. And then finding the jetpack and spending hours and hours just flying around with a jetpack. God, what an epic game with an epic scope.

Yeah, it’s awesome. Endless variety, yet coherent, and full of style. It was hard for me to stop playing even when there was absolutely nothing left undone.