San Francisco International sits about six miles south of Daly City, close enough that residents work its terminals, drive its access roads, and board more flights out of it than almost any other community on the Peninsula. When something goes wrong at or near SFO, the resulting injury claim rarely behaves like a normal California case, and that surprises people. A Daly City Personal Injury Attorney handling this kind of matter has to figure out first which body of law even applies, because the answer changes the deadline, the venue, the available damages, and sometimes whether a lawsuit is possible at all.
Which law governs an SFO-area aviation injury claim?
It depends on where the flight was going, who caused the harm, and where the injury physically happened. Three regimes compete for control.
International flights arriving at or departing from SFO fall under the Montreal Convention of 1999, a treaty that displaces state negligence law entirely for passengers on covered itineraries. It creates a two-tier system. The carrier is strictly liable for proven damages up to a capped amount regardless of fault, and above that cap the airline is still liable unless it can prove the injury was not caused by its negligence. That cap is set in Special Drawing Rights, an International Monetary Fund accounting unit. The most recent ICAO revision, effective December 28, 2024, raised it to 151,880 SDRs, which converts to roughly $200,000 depending on the exchange rate on the day. ICAO reviews the figure every five years, so verify the current number before relying on it.
Domestic flights are governed by California tort law, but federal aviation regulation still narrows the field. The Airline Deregulation Act, codified at 49 U.S.C. § 41713, preempts state claims relating to an airline’s price, route, or service, and courts have read federal aviation safety standards as occupying much of the field on how aircraft are maintained and operated. Personal injury claims generally survive. Claims dressed up as complaints about boarding procedures or service quality often do not.
Air traffic control error puts you against the United States government under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which is a different process with its own rules.
What deadlines apply, and how are they different from a normal injury case?
The filing windows here are shorter and less forgiving than California’s standard two-year personal injury limit under Code of Civil Procedure § 335.1.
- Montreal Convention claims: two years from arrival or scheduled arrival, under Article 35. Courts treat this as a hard condition on the right itself, not a statute of limitations, so the usual tolling arguments generally fail.
- Federal Tort Claims Act claims for air traffic control negligence: an administrative claim on Standard Form 95 within two years, then the agency has six months to respond, then six months to file suit.
- Claims against SFO itself: six months. The airport is owned and operated by the City and County of San Francisco, so the California Government Claims Act applies, with the presentation deadline set by Government Code § 911.2.
- Product liability against a general aviation manufacturer: the General Aviation Revitalization Act of 1994 imposes an 18-year statute of repose on aircraft with fewer than 20 seats not in scheduled service, measured from delivery.
Missing the six-month government claim window is the most common way a viable SFO ground-side case dies before it starts.
What if the injury happened on the ground rather than in flight?
Most SFO-area claims never involve an aircraft in motion. Jet bridge falls, baggage system injuries, shuttle bus collisions on the airport loop, escalator failures in the international terminal, and crashes on the Highway 101 and 380 interchanges all produce serious injuries and all follow different tracks.
If a city-owned condition or employee caused the harm, you are in Government Claims Act territory with that six-month clock. If a private concessionaire, ground handler, or rental car operator is responsible, ordinary premises and negligence rules apply. Airport employees typically have workers’ compensation as their exclusive remedy against their employer, but a separate third-party claim against a contractor or equipment manufacturer often remains open and is where meaningful recovery usually comes from.
Venue is its own quirk. SFO is physically located in unincorporated San Mateo County, the same county as Daly City, so state court cases frequently land in San Mateo County Superior Court in Redwood City rather than San Francisco.
Why does an SFO case need a Daly City Personal Injury Attorney familiar with aviation rules?
Because the evidence rules and the defendants are unusual, and a general practitioner can lose ground quickly. Under 49 U.S.C. § 1154(b), the NTSB’s probable cause report is inadmissible in civil litigation, though underlying factual material developed in the investigation can often be used. Crashes over water beyond 12 nautical miles bring in the Death on the High Seas Act, which restricts the damages a family can recover. Airlines and their insurers coordinate defense counsel within hours of an incident, frequently before injured passengers have left the hospital.
The 2013 Asiana Flight 214 crash at SFO showed how this plays out. Claims from a single event were split across treaty law, federal court in the Northern District of California, and foreign carrier defenses, with outcomes shaped as much by which legal track a passenger was on as by the injuries themselves.
Preserving your position early matters more here than in almost any other injury context. If you or a family member was hurt on a flight, in a terminal, or on the roads feeding SFO, talk with a Daly City Personal Injury Attorney before any deadline runs and before you give a recorded statement to a carrier’s adjuster. A short conversation now can decide which law governs your claim, and that decision is often worth more than anything that happens later in the case.