Limitations asks when the clock started on you. Repose asks when it ran out on the thing. The first clock waits for an injury and, in some cases, for the day you could have known about it. The second starts the day the product left the seller’s hands, and it runs whether anyone was hurt yet or not, whether anyone knew or not, until the claim against the maker is simply gone.
Limitations is the clock everyone has heard of: in Texas a person must bring suit for personal injury “not later than two years after the day the cause of action accrues,” and for a death “not later than two years after the day the cause of action accrues,” which “accrues on the death of the injured person” (Civil Practice and Remedies Code Section 16.003). Repose is the other clock, and it is written into the products chapter of the same code. “Except as provided by Subsections (c), (d), and (d-1), a claimant must commence a products liability action against a manufacturer or seller of a product before the end of 15 years after the date of the sale of the product by the defendant” (Section 16.012). Read the trigger again. Not the injury. Not the discovery. The sale, by the defendant being sued, which is why Lift, Not Hold noted that the fifteen years on a jack run from the day the defendant sold it. A product bought used, a machine on its third owner, a truck part installed a decade ago: the clock on each has been running since the sale, and the injury that finally happens may land on a claim that died before it was born.
The statute keeps three doors open. If the maker or seller “expressly warrants in writing that the product has a useful safe life of longer than 15 years,” the claim lives as long as the warranty says. The section “does not apply to a products liability action seeking damages for personal injury or wrongful death” where the person was exposed to the product inside the fifteen years, the exposure “caused the claimant’s disease that is the basis of the action,” and the symptoms did not show themselves inside the fifteen years “to a degree and for a duration that would put a reasonable person on notice that the person suffered some injury”; that is the asbestos door, and the long-latency chemical exposures that DuFour v. BP shows are won or lost on the expert. And the section “applies only to the sale and not to the lease of a product.” Then, in its last subsection, Texas steps aside for one kind of product: the section “does not apply to any claim to which the General Aviation Revitalization Act of 1994” “or its exceptions are applicable.”
That federal statute is repose in its purest form. “Except as provided in subsection (b), no civil action for damages for death or injury to persons or damage to property arising out of an accident involving a general aviation aircraft may be brought against the manufacturer of the aircraft or the manufacturer of any new component, system, subassembly, or other part of the aircraft, in its capacity as a manufacturer if the accident occurred” “after the applicable limitation period,” and the limitation period “means 18 years with respect to general aviation aircraft and the components, systems, subassemblies, and other parts of such aircraft” (General Aviation Revitalization Act of 1994). The clock starts on “the date of delivery of the aircraft to its first purchaser or lessee,” or on first delivery to a dealer. A general aviation aircraft is one that, when its certificate was issued, “had a maximum seating capacity of fewer than 20 passengers,” and that “was not, at the time of the accident, engaged in scheduled passenger-carrying operations”; a business jet flown on an on-demand charter can still fall inside that definition, which turns on scheduled passenger service, not on whether the flight was for hire. The statute “supersedes any State law to the extent that such law permits a civil action described in subsection (a) to be brought after the applicable limitation period” it sets. Two features keep it from being a wall. The clock restarts, part by part: for “any new component, system, subassembly, or other part which replaced another” part “and which is alleged to have caused such death, injury, or damage,” the eighteen years run from “the date of completion of the replacement or addition.” And four exceptions: the bar does not apply if the claimant “pleads with specificity the facts necessary to prove, and proves, that the manufacturer” “knowingly misrepresented to the Federal Aviation Administration, or concealed or withheld from the Federal Aviation Administration, required information that is material and relevant” and “causally related to the harm”; if the person hurt “is a passenger for purposes of receiving treatment for a medical or other emergency”; if the person “was not aboard the aircraft at the time of the accident”; or to a claim “brought under a written warranty.”
The move: find the dates before you find the theory. The sale date of the product, from the invoice or the registration or the defendant’s own records, because the fifteen years in Texas run from the defendant’s sale and a second-hand chain can put different defendants on different clocks. For an aircraft, the delivery date to the first purchaser, and then the maintenance logs, because every replaced part carries its own eighteen years, and an airplane that is thirty years old may be flying on a part that is three. Then read the exceptions as a checklist, not a consolation: what was told to the FAA and what was withheld is a question of records, and the person on the ground under a crash has never been inside the bar at all. When the claim against the maker is truly gone, the case does not end; it turns. The federal statute protects the manufacturer in its capacity as a manufacturer, and no one else; the Texas statute reaches a seller too, but only for the product claim and only from that seller’s own sale. The operator who held the flight, which The Operator explains, the owner, the shop that did the last overhaul, the carrier that dispatched the truck: their clocks are the ordinary ones, and Spoliation is still the first letter, because the logs that answer every question above are kept by the people the questions are about.
One caution. Repose is a statute, and it means exactly what it says and nothing kinder: a perfectly good claim against a careless manufacturer can be dead on the day of the injury, and no judge can revive it. That is why the dates come first. This is the shape of the law, not advice on any case.
Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.003 (subsections (a) and (b)); § 16.012 (subsections (b), (c), (d), (f) and (g)), as posted on FindLaw, current as of January 1, 2026. General Aviation Revitalization Act of 1994, Pub. L. 103-298, 108 Stat. 1552 (Aug. 17, 1994), reprinted in note to 49 U.S.C. § 40101 (sections 2(a), 2(b)(1) through (4), 2(c), 2(d) and 3(3), from the Statutes at Large as posted on GovInfo). This is general information, not legal advice. Figures and text as published at publication.
