Airline keeps mistaking 101-year-old woman for baby | Hacker News Reader

Airline keeps mistaking 101-year-old woman for baby

bbc.co.uk

66 pointsuser2018012018 comments

This may also create a hassle for pilots, since this information is used to calculate weight, which in turn is used to plan many things related to the flight.

Now there's enough safety margins here that one person or a dozen aren't going to create any real-life problems, but if your systems have enough of these issues and other checks fail, on some flight they might very well finally add up to something more serious.

Likely there will just be an investigation because the takeoff weight was seriously wrong[1], but there have also been crashes in the past[2].

[1] https://avherald.com/h?article=4e59311c

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Midwest_Flight_5481

So if you have a holiday flight of many old time pensioners, and their support staff, your crew might be expecting 50 to 60 babies...

It's an interesting "time is a circle" problem given that a century only has 100 years and then we loop around again. 2-digit years is convenient for people in many situations but they are very lossy, and horrible for machines.

It reminds me of this breaking change to .Net from last year.[1][2] Maybe AA just needs to update .Net which would pad them out until the 2050's when someone born in the 1950s would be having...exactly the same problem in the article. (It is configurable now so you could just keep pushing it each decade, until it wraps again).

Or they could use 4-digit years.

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/75148 [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/compatibility/...

Just use 4-digit years. Done.

Could this be a problem in the Sabre code, from the early 1960's? (pre-Y2k updates). American and Sabre separated their businesses in 2000, but some code might be in use.

American Airlines developed Sabre in conjunction with IBM. The project was famously started by the chance encounter of an IBM salesman and the American Airlines president being seated next to each other on a flight in 1957.

Yes.

The format for date of birth is DDMMMYY

Eg January 12 2023 would be

12JAN23

And February 17 1994 would be

17FEB94

I think you can see where this is going

January 12 1923 would also be

12JAN23

https://hasbrouck.org/documents/APIS.html

A filthy filthy hax

January 12 1923 is 12JANX3

I'm confused about the wheelchair thing - is she expecting them to automatically provide a wheelchair for her due to age, or is she requesting one explicitly?

There's a request for her to be assisted off the plane. Airport staff assumes they can just carry her, since the system says she is 1-2 years old, so they didn't bother to bring the wheelchair.

The markers for wheelchair requests arn’t very accurate. Depending on the flight 0-100% of passengers who have wheelchair requests in the system end up using them.

Sometimes they get put on the wrong passenger, sometimes the passenger decides not to use it.

No airline staff is going to assume they are carrying an infant as they are not allowed to travel alone. But they would definitely assume as wheelchair request is an error or mistake.

> For example, on one occasion, airport staff did not have transport ready for her inside the terminal as they were expecting a baby who could be carried.

As per the article, airport staff did expect to carry a baby.

I suppose a hack would be to enter today-99 in the year of birth (so 1925 this year, 1926 next year, and so on). Afaik only the name has to be exact for the security theatre people?

I assume she only flies within the US. If she tried to fly internationally she might not be allowed to board because the API record submitted by the airline wouldn't be correct.

It needs to be correct in the US as well.

https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/credential-aut...

I thought the name thing was so that you couldn't resell the ticket.

That’s the real reason airlines like it, yes, but it was put in place after 9/11 using security as the justification.

I actually do get the benefit of having the name on the ticket match the person traveling, but there’s no theoretical reason that couldn’t be safely combined with a resale feature. The obstacles are mainly with the technology, the business model, the applicable political incentives, etc.

Bless her heart. I hope she gets early seating like my mom regardless of the airline's "Y2K" error.

Or rather late seating. Last year I got injured 1 day before flying and end up asking for assistance because I was alone with my kids and carrying a heavy hiking back pack while using crutches that I borrowed from family and were too small for me.

Airline just told us to sit in a chair next to the gate and they would call us and help us at the very end of the boarding phase. It was much more comfortable for me and my daughters to stay in the lounge in a comfy chair than boarding early and have to wait ages on a tiny economical seat while being sometimes smacked by other passengers bags and stuff while they were looking for their seat.

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