Before anyone gets too excited about the prospect of anybody other than US citizens bringing suit in the United States, they should aquaint themselves with a legal process for dismissing forum shopping in a more generous jurisdiction. This was an accident to an american built aircraft operated by a Turkish airline and occuring in Holland. The majority of the potential litigants would be Dutch or Turkish nationals. The defendants to a suit would almost certainly co-operate and surrender to the jurisdiction of the claimants, thereby making the use of a dismissal under a motion of
forum non conveniens very likely in the case of the non US nationals.
Read Piper v. Reyno for a US supreme court ruling that illustrates the point.
Piper Aircraft Co. v. Reyno, 454 U.S. 235 (1981): American law students usually read and argue about this case. A Piper Aztec airplane crashed in Scotland, en route from Blackpool to Perth, and all six people on board were killed. The pilot and passengers were all Scottish, and the wreckage of the airplane ended up in a hangar at Farnsborough, England, so British authorities could examine it. The owner and operator of the airplane, as well as the pilot's estate, were sued in a British court. It appeared that mechanical failure caused the crash, and either the airframe (made by Piper Aircraft in Pennsylvania) or the propeller (made by Hartzell Propeller in Ohio) was responsible. A court in California agreed to appoint a legal secretary, Ms. Reyno, to represent the estates of the passengers, and she sued Piper and Hartzell in the U.S. They had the case dismissed on forum non conveniens, but a Court of Appeals ruled that the case should proceed in American court because Scottish law would be less favorable to Reyno (specifically, they don't have the same rule of strict liability there). The Supreme Court decided this was an invalid reason for keeping the case in America and overruled the Court of Appeals, establishing that choice of law is not a valid criterion for supporting or defeating a forum non conveniens dismissal.