..the future, which will undoubtedly see unmanned airliners giving us better reliability and cheaper flights.
You think????!!!!! One thing that has kept airline safety so high is that the pilots in the front don't want to die either.
Passengers wanting increasingly unrealistically cheap flights is one cause of the lowering of pilot standards and training, which is arguably one cause of this crash.
Flying in a plane is often cheaper than the equivalent train journey. How can that be economically possible? Think about it for one second. Think about where savings need to be made to make flying a jetliner, operating in three dimensions cheaper than a train, operating in one dimension???
(Before the trolls get out of their pits - I do realise that no trains go from South America to Europe !)