The Austrian manufacturer of an allegedly defective airplane engine cannot be sued in Texas by a woman who was severely injured in a small plane crash at an airport in Addison, the Texas Supreme Court said Friday.
The court, in a unanimous opinion, dismissed the lawsuit against BRP-Rotax GmbH & Co. KG filed by Sheema Shaik and her husband, who witnessed the crash. It found that Texas courts have no specific personal jurisdiction over Rotax.
Writing for the court, Justice Evan A. Young applied the “so-called ‘stream-of-commerce-plus’ test, under which Rotax is subject to jurisdiction in Texas only if it had an intent or purpose to serve the Texas market.”
In a concurring opinion, two justices urged the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider its approach to personal jurisdiction, saying fairness standards articulated 80 years ago result in unpredictable and inconsistent outcomes in factually similar cases.
The Texas decision reversed an opinion from the Fifth Court of Appeals, which affirmed a Dallas County trial court’s denial of Rotax’s special appearance challenging the jurisdiction. The court of appeals held that Rotax had sufficient indirect contacts with Texas for Texas courts to exercise jurisdiction.
Shaik suffered a traumatic brain injury, severe burns and multiple bone fractures in the March 2018 runway crash of the Piper Sport airplane in which she was a passenger. Her husband watched the doomed takeoff, and the couple sued Rotax for strict liability, negligence and gross negligence.
The Supreme Court noted that Kodiak, an independent Bahamian distributor, purchased the engine in Austria, shipped it to the Bahamas and then sold it to its sub-distributor in Florida, which sold it to the Texas company that installed the engine.
Young raised a two-prong test in which Rotax must have taken a purposeful act to conduct activities in Texas and that claims against the foreign company must arise out of that act.
The Shaiks’ claim that the distribution network between Rotax and Kodiak shows Rotax employed a network of authorized distributors and services for engines in Texas, had a repair center in Bulverde and interacted with Texans through its website. They pointed to about 150 Rotax engines registered in Texas between 2016 and 2020.
But the court found that Kodiak had substantial discretion in marketing and advertising Rotax products and was responsible for establishing repair centers throughout its territory, which spanned nearly the entire Western Hemisphere.
The agreement between Rotax and Kodiak “expresses no view, much less any command, about whether any business at all will be transacted in Texas — it simply requires Kodiak to deliver results within a territory spanning two continents,” Young said.
“If this were enough to constitute purposeful availment, then the stream-of-commerce-plus test would come to an end,” he said.
Targeting Texas remains the touchstone, the court said.
“We will not overlook such targeting when it is wrapped up in various business arrangements, but neither will we find targeting that does not exist merely because a product ultimately comes to Texas,” Young said.
“All the evidence in this case demonstrates that Rotax’s engine came to Texas by the unilateral actions of their parties — and certainly not from any ‘stream’ engineered, controlled, or manipulated by Rotax,” he wrote.
Wallace Jefferson of Alexander Dubose and Jefferson argued the case for Rotax. Shannon Turner Hays of Payne Mitchell Ramsey Law Group presented the case for Shaik and her husband during oral arguments last December. In 2025, Hays joined Durham, Pittard & Spalding.
The court distinguished the case from its 2023 opinion in Texas v. Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft, where it found a foreign company need not “single out Texas in a unique way” to establish specific jurisdiction. That ruling cleared the way for the state of Texas to sue German auto manufacturers Audi and Volkswagen over alleged violations of state environmental laws connected to the emissions-cheating software scandal perpetrated by the companies.
Noting that Volkswagen was not even a “stream of commerce” case, Young said the “distribution agreement between Rotax and Kodiak does not resemble the control the German manufacturers exercised there, which amounted to directly and purposefully affecting cars already in Texas, and indeed there is no evidence that Rotax specifically targeted Texas at all.”
Justice Brett Busby filed a concurring opinion joined by Justice John Devine calling on the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider its approach to personal jurisdiction. Busby called on the court to jettison its focus on “fair play” and “reasonableness” as the constitutionally mandated touchstones ushered in by International Shoe Co. v. Washington nearly 80 years ago. He said the court should take an originalist view that looks at the federal Constitution’s text and history.
“These squishy, subjective standards — unmoored from constitutional text and history — have failed on their own terms, producing inconsistent, unpredictable, and thus unfair results in factually similar cases brought in different courts,” Busby said. “Indeed, this very case would have been decided differently had it been filed in a Texas federal court.”
The Rotax case number is 23-0756.