The Texas Supreme Court has granted Bell Helicopter’s petition for writ of mandamus to compel a Galveston County trial court to render summary judgment in its favor under the federal statute of repose for general aviation aircraft.
In re Bell Helicopter Services, Inc. and Bell Helicopter Textron Inc.(No. 24-0883; April 24, 2026) arose from a fatal accident involving a helicopter manufactured and sold by Bell in 1997. The accident occurred in 2017. Plaintiffs brought a wrongful death claim in a Galveston County court-at-law. Bell moved for no-evidence summary judgment on the basis of the 18-year statute of repose prescribed by the General Aviation Revitalization Act of 1994 (GARA). The trial court denied the motion. Bell filed a mandamus petition with the Houston [14TH] Court of Appeals, which denied it. Bell sought mandamus relief from SCOTX.
In an opinion by Chief Justice Blacklock, SCOTX granted relief. GARA makes an exception to the statute of repose if a manufacturer “replaces or adds a ‘new’ part, and that part is later ‘alleged to have caused’ the accident, then the clock runs from the date of the ‘replacement or addition.’ But only if the part “is alleged to have caused” the accident. In 2007, 20 years after the date of manufacture and delivery, an original panel came loose and caused the fatal accident. Plaintiffs alleged that the copter’s flight manual failed to adequately warn about the dangers of flying with a loose panel (although it instructed pilots to check the engine cowling before operating the vehicle), and because Bell revised the manual several times in the years before the crash, the clock restarted each time.
The problem for Plaintiff was that GARA’s exception applies to new parts, not revisions to the manual. Additionally, “[t]he alleged defect in the manual has not changed since the helicopter was delivered in 1997, and the continued omission of the disputed warning across subsequent versions of the manual does not amount to a new part that restarts the 18-year clock.” As the Court explained, “[a]n implicit premise of this argument is that we should treat the preflight-check—or perhaps the whole manual—as a single, undifferentiated ‘part’ or ‘system,’ such as revising anything within it restarts the clock for everything within it.” But GARA doesn’t work that way. “The statute,” the Chief Justice observed, “[] requires identifying the specific ‘component, system, subassembly, or other part’ that is both ‘new’ and ‘alleged to have caused’ the injury. It does not not permit the plaintiff to point to a collection or category of parts, some of which are ‘new’ and some other of which is ‘alleged to have caused’ the injury.” Put another way, GARA’s “rolling” provision “leaves ‘no room to argue that replacement of a few parts of a larger system starts the rolling limitation period anew for all parts in the larger system’” (citations omitted).
The Court noted that case law interpreting GARA has read the statute to cover a revised flight manual as a “part.” But revising a manual doesn’t trigger the rolling provision, only a substantive revision relating to the allegedly defective component that proximately caused the crash. Summarizing the case law, the Chief Justice stated that “[t]he principle that emerges from these and other cases is consistent: Replacing some parts or components of a system does not restart the repose period for the entire system.” That was the case here. The statute of repose was triggered in 1997, barring Plaintiff’s claims.
The Court further ruled that mandamus relief was justified in this case. GARA gives a defendant the right “to avoid litigation altogether.” GARA expressly preempts state law. “A party wrongly forced to defend an action that Congress has said may not be ‘brought,’” the Chief concluded, “and that no state law may ‘permit[] to be ‘brought’—has suffered an ‘impairment or loss’ of its federal rights that generally cannot be remedied by an appeal following trial and judgment in a case no Texas court should have entertained in the first place.” Bell had no adequate remedy on appeal. The Court directed the trial court to grant Bell’s motion for summary judgment.
