GTA 5 Under the Bridge: All 50 Locations and How to Fly Under Them All

GTA 5 hides 50 "Under the Bridge" challenges across San Andreas: fly a plane or helicopter beneath a marked bridge, crossing, or overpass without touching the ground or the structure itself, and it registers as complete. Get 25 of the 50 and you tick a box toward 100% completion. Get all 50, plus all 15 Knife Flights, and you unlock the Close Shave trophy/achievement.

The essentials

• 50 bridges total, scattered across Los Santos and Blaine County, playable as Michael, Franklin or Trevor
• 25 of 50 counts toward the game's 100% completion checklist
• All 50 + all 15 Knife Flights unlocks the Close Shave trophy/achievement
• Rule: no contact with the ground, water, or any part of the bridge while passing under it
• Best vehicle: the Maverick helicopter - grab one from the Central Los Santos hospital helipad
• A few bridges (narrow rail crossings, the Zancudo River passage) are genuinely hard and worth practicing separately

What counts as an Under the Bridge challenge?

Rockstar scattered these 50 markers under freeway overpasses, flood-control channels, railway crossings, and a handful of genuine river bridges. Fly a plane or helicopter through the gap underneath and the game flashes a confirmation the moment you clear it. Whichever protagonist you're using in story mode works fine - the challenge tracks per save file, not per character.

You do not need to find every one in a single session or in any particular order. The game keeps count as you go, and a collectible tracker appears once you've registered a valid pass. If you crash, land, or clip any part of the structure, that attempt simply doesn't count - there's no penalty beyond having to line up again.

The one rule that actually matters

Every guide boils it down to the same sentence: you cannot touch anything while going under. Not the ground, not the water, not the bridge deck, not a support pillar. If your landing gear skims a wave or your rotor blade taps a girder, the pass is voided even if you technically flew "under" the bridge.

That single rule is why helicopters beat planes for this challenge. A plane needs a long, straight, mostly level approach to thread a gap cleanly, and San Andreas' bridges rarely offer that much room. A helicopter can slow down, adjust its line at the last second, and thread far tighter gaps.

Best vehicle: the Maverick helicopter

The Maverick is the community's go-to pick. It's stable, reasonably fast, and small enough to clear the tightest crossings if you fly it carefully. You can find one parked on the helipad at the Central Los Santos hospital, or call for one if you've unlocked helicopter deliveries.

A few tips that make a real difference:

• Level off before every approach. Fly at bridge height a few hundred meters out, not in a dive, so you're not correcting altitude and heading at the same time.
• Save before attempting a hard one. A quick save-and-reload beats redoing a five-minute flight across the map after a crash.
• Kill your horizontal drift first on the narrowest gaps. For crossings barely wider than the rotor disc, hover, cancel any sideways momentum, then ease straight through rather than flying it like a normal pass.
• Watch your altitude on low-clearance bridges, not just your left-right line - some of the tightest calls are vertical, not horizontal.

Where the 50 bridges actually are

The 50 locations aren't evenly spread - they cluster around a handful of terrain features:

Los Santos flood-control channels and freeways. A big chunk of the count sits inside the city itself: the concrete drainage canals that run under streets like Vespucci Boulevard, San Andreas Avenue, and Dutch London Street, plus freeway overpasses on Interstate 5, Route 68, and Highway 17. These are generally the most forgiving - wide, well-lit, easy to line up.

Blaine County rail crossings. North of the city, a string of challenges sit under railway bridges: Grapeseed, the Tataviam Mountains crossing (watch for light poles near the rails), and Cassidy Creek. These tend to have more room than they look like they do, since trains need real clearance, but the approach angle can be awkward in hilly terrain.

River and lake crossings. A handful of the hardest challenges on the list are here. The Zancudo River bridge in East Zancudo is widely considered one of the toughest passes in the game. Calafia Bridge, by contrast, sits over open water, so you get a clean runway-style approach if you set up from over the lake.

Coastal and industrial areas. Elysian Island and Buccaneer Way host some of the easier, more helicopter-friendly gaps - good places to warm up before tackling the rail crossings or river bridges.

Remote/awkward spots. The bridge near the Altruist Camp is notoriously tight for fixed-wing aircraft; most players just use a helicopter there instead of forcing a plane through.

The hardest bridges, and how to beat them

A short list of locations that repeatedly trip people up:

• The Zancudo River bridge (East Zancudo): narrow and low. Approach slow, level, and dead-center; don't try to power through it at speed.
• Narrow rail crossings with support beams close together: land first if you can, to kill all horizontal momentum, then lift off and fly straight through instead of approaching from a moving start.
• Low-clearance crossings: these fail because of altitude, not alignment. Stay level and resist the urge to climb as you get close.
• The Altruist Camp crossing: treat it as helicopter-only; a plane's wingspan makes it needlessly hard.

If a pass isn't registering even though you're sure you cleared it cleanly, back off, quick-save, and try again from a slower, more level approach - a graze you didn't feel is the most common reason a "clean" pass doesn't count.

Under the Bridge and 100% completion

You do not need all 50 for the game's 100% completion checklist - only 25 of the 50 are required. That means you can cherry-pick the easier Los Santos flood channels and freeway overpasses, skip the nastiest river and rail crossings, and still clear this requirement. If you're only chasing 100%, focus on the cluster inside and around the city before flying out to Blaine County.

The Close Shave trophy/achievement

Getting all 50 Under the Bridge locations, on top of all 15 Knife Flights (grazing an aircraft's wing between two objects), unlocks Close Shave. It's one of the more time-consuming collectible-style trophies in GTA 5, mainly because a handful of the harder bridges take repeated attempts to line up cleanly. Budget a real session for the last 10-15 locations rather than trying to knock them all out in one flight - fatigue is when most failed passes happen.

Tips to clear all 50 efficiently

• Route by region, not by bridge number. Guides number the 50 locations 1 through 50, but the numbering varies slightly between sources - what matters is grouping nearby bridges and flying a loop through each cluster instead of crisscrossing the map.
• Do the easy Los Santos cluster first to build muscle memory for the "level, slow, centered" approach before the harder rail and river crossings.
• Save your session before the last handful of hard ones, since a bad crash after 45 clean passes is the most frustrating way to lose progress.
• Combine the run with other collectibles. If you're already flying the map for Under the Bridge, it's worth also picking up the spaceship parts or checking your 100% completion checklist for anything else you can knock out from the air.

How this fits into 100% completion

Under the Bridge is one piece of a much longer checklist. If you're working toward full completion, it sits alongside collectible runs like the 50 Stunt Jump locations, the 50 spaceship parts, the 30 submarine parts, and the 50 Letter Scraps scattered around San Andreas. None of them are required together, but doing them back to back while you're already exploring the map is the fastest way through the list.

Under the Bridge rewards patience more than skill - the Maverick can thread almost every gap in the game if you slow down, level off, and stop fighting your own momentum. Bank the easy Los Santos cluster first, save your progress on the hard ones, and the full set of 50 is a couple of focused sessions at most.