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Airline keeps mistaking 101-year-old woman for 1-year-old baby
- agilob 3y agoNow that's a problem to have.
- a012 3y agoNobody remembers Y2K anymore?
- Hamuko 3y agoYear 2038 occupies my brainspace much more than Y2K.
- senectus1 3y agonah, she'll be right mate :-D and if not, I plan on be very close to retirement by then anyway.
- prerok 3y agoMe too :) It does open up opportunities for consulting in all the programming languages in use today (or 10-20 years ago), so we can expect to be in high demand right before retiring :)
- OccamsMirror 3y agoPretty sure ChatGPT or whatever replaces it will be doing the job instead of us.
- ben_w 3y agoI'm just hoping it won't do that before I plan to retire.
- kugelblitz 3y agoShoot, I'm just realizing that we're as far from 2038 as we are from 2010. In 2010 the the iPad was released and the movie Avatar had come out. So we're closer to 2038 than the release of the iPhone (2007).
- cookiengineer 3y agoYou, sir, have just invented the Imperial Unit for time measurement. "How old are you?" "3 iPhones and half an M1 Macbook"
- ben_w 3y ago"Four score and seven iPhones ago our investors brought forth on this bay, a new company, conceived in Los Altos, and dedicated to the proposition that all home computers are created as decorative art pieces in a rainbow of colours."
- kibibu 3y agoI remember thinking, in 2000, "well hopefully we've learned our lesson so 2038 isn't a big deal". Then the public consensus switched to "Y2K was entirely made up and nothing bad happened" so I'm somewhat less optimistic.
- ben_w 3y agoMmm, likewise. Right now I'm half-expecting that unfixed 2038 bugs will accidentally save us from AI apocalypse. Or possibly cause it.
- senectus1 3y agoamazing given the run around and preparation/mitigation work we did in that preceding year! Any work done well, is just work that obviously didn't need money spent on it in the first place.
- silon42 3y agoLooks like the airlines failed to fix it.
- robjan 3y agoThey fixed it by having a rolling "epoch" it just so happens that some people's ages don't fit that assumption.
- greenavocado 3y agoThen she doesn't need to pay for a seat reservation she can go as a lap infant.
- defrost 3y agosee also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40185903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40185903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40186552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40186552
- irjustin 3y agoShe can even get the bassinet! Best seat in the house i swear.
- oefrha 3y agoFixing a non-critical bug that affects <0.001% of bookings in airlines’ ancient systems, which are likely stringly typed in specific formats in many places? Good luck. They can’t even show my family members’ names right.
- eliaspro 3y agoIf the company not getting your family members' names right operates under a GDPR-affected jurisdiction, they can be theoretically forced to fix this issue. See also the highly relevant story "EBCDIC is incompatible with GDPR": https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/10/ebcdic-is-incompatible-with-gdpr/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/10/ebcdic-is-incompatible-with...
- TazeTSchnitzel 3y agoDates in passports' machine-readable zones only have two-digit years. Another victim: https://theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/feb/12/home-office-tells-man-101-his-parents-must-confirm-id https://theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/feb/12/home-office-tell....
- suyash 3y agodumb programmer who wrote that code and dumber qa who failed to test it
- deepsun 3y agoSo it's basically well-known Y2K bug.
- robertlagrant 3y ago> Dates in passports' machine-readable zones only have two-digit years. Simultaneously the most and least surprising situation.
- cedilla 3y agoI was about to write that surely, that only applies to the OCR section printed on the physical passport, but if I read ICAO 9303 correctly, it's the other way round - the OCR section can include either a four-digit year or a two-digit year, but the chip has only six bytes for the date of birth, representing YYMMDD in digits (plus special characters for an unknown or partially known date of birth). Edit: apparently there's an optional section in the chip (data group 11 or DG11) that allows for longer-form data than the ancient machine-readable format, including non-latin letters in the name and a birthdate including the century. I don't know how widely used that is though.
- sedatk 3y agoWaves fist towards the sky: COBOL!
- tapland 3y ago\o/ Deal with this all the time working with an old system written in COBOL. Current system was patched with a db column for century. The problem that really flies under the radar though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
- mnky9800n 3y agoY2k strikes again!
- divbzero 3y agoTo take full advantage, her daughter could book a ticket for her as a lap infant and fly her for free.
- codegeek 3y agoThis reminds me of a story I read where someone named "Null" had lot of issues with computerized systems. Can't find thr exact story but this was a few years ago.
- teh_infallible 3y agoI heard a story like that where someone had a vanity license plate “NONE” and kept getting cited for not having a plate.
- thih9 3y agoIt was “null”: https://www.wired.com/story/null-license-plate-landed-one-hacker-ticket-hell/ https://www.wired.com/story/null-license-plate-landed-one-ha... > facing $12,049 of traffic fines wrongly sent his way. He’s still not sure if he’ll be able to renew his auto registration this year without paying someone else's tickets. And thanks to the Kafkaesque loop he’s caught in, it’s not clear if the citations will ever stop coming.
- vsnf 3y agoAn object lesson in getting funny with automated systems that have the power to inflict consequences.
- thih9 3y agoTo be fair, the consequences are very much inadequate. This should have been a letter saying “we allowed you to register that plate by mistake, change it asap”. If anything, this is a lesson to not build systems that can issue tickets to the wrong person - and allow the system’s decisions to be easily overridden at the very least.
- vsnf 3y agoThat's the takeaway for people in charge of the software development, sure. But really, is it even actually a lesson? To my knowledge, there was no accountability, no backlash, no one got fired or reprimanded, no manager was denied a promotion. What lesson was learned by the stewards of the system, really? Meanwhile, a lesson was very much learned by Mr. Tartaro who, as a DEFCON speaker, should have absolutely known better. He was playing with fire, and now he's suffering the consequences. I don't want to come across as defending the system in use, although it seems to be as much of a social issue as a technical one with people interpreting the text field as being invalid, but this was clearly a dumbass thing to do.
- avar 3y agoAmerican Airlines's policy, like most airlines, is that children above the age of 2 require their own seat. So there's a very narrow age range where she'll need to suffer this particular problem, if she makes it to 102 she'll be out of those particular woods.
- ben_w 3y agoWheelchair, not plane seat. She's already got the plane seat just fine.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- avar 3y agoThe article doesn't state it explicitly, but I think there's an implied correlation. Before the age of 2 you don't get a seat, and it's implied that your guardians are 100% responsible for your mobility. Whereas a child old enough to require a seat might also need to request a wheelchair, and would be provided with one.
- SSLy 3y ago> The article doesn't state it explicitly "Patricia’s seat was booked as an adult ticket."
- vidarh 3y agoBefore the age of 2 you don't need to book a seat. You can book one on every airline I flew with when my son was <2 at least. A child under two needs to be on the lap of a parent during takeoff and landing but can otherwise use a seat. I flew with my son first time when he was about 3 months old, and we had a seat for him because it made it a lot easier. In this case, she did book a seat.
- avar 3y agoShe booked an adult seat, but was (according to their broken system) 1 years old while doing so. That's different than booking an extra seat for an accompanied infant.
- hokua1 3y ago[dead]
- cm2187 3y agoMany datetime types can't deal with dates before 1900. There must have been quite many born in the XIX century still alive in the 1980s, even the 1990s.
- mschuster91 3y agoYeah, but back then customer service agents actually had competence and authority to bypass computers where they (inevitably) messed up. These days, it's all drones who get heavily punished if they drive off-script, and that's assuming they can go off script.
- dmurray 3y agoIt seems like her main complaint is not that she's being expected to travel with adults or lie in the bassinet - but that the airport didn't know to provide her with a wheelchair. I would not expect that to be tied to age! I thought anyone could tick the "I need assistance" box and get wheelchairs, golf carts, etc. Sure, they could guess that their 90+-year old passengers are likely to need them, but there are plenty of 80-year olds that need them and plenty who don't.
- lancebeet 3y agoBut suppose they did tick that box. If someone ticks "need assistance" for a 1 year old, you would bring a stroller and not a wheelchair, no? A casual googling indicates that the smallest generally available wheelchairs are for ages 2 and up.
- mailund 3y agoMight differ between countries/providers, but for the airline I'm working at, checking the box leads the customer to a separate page where they can detail what kind of assistance is needed. Might be that the cabin crew misunderstands the order when they see that the passenger is registered as a 1 year old though
- BlueTemplar 3y ago> “I would like them to fix the computer as my poor daughter had to carry all our luggage and apparel almost a mile from one gate to the other,” Took a while to hit me : the daughter is most-likely nearing 80 herself !
- liotier 3y agoA feature, not a bug: the 101 years old lady and the 1 year old baby need the same blended food !
- MathMonkeyMan 3y agoShe's got some chompers on her.
- arrowsmith 3y agoShe's 101 and still travelling by plane? By the time my grandma reached 90 it was a Herculean struggle just to get her in and out of a taxi. Filing this one under "problems I'd love to have".
- SirMaster 3y agoI knew a guy once who was still skiing in Colorado past age 100... You can Google skiing past 100 and find multiple examples of people who make it this long.
- croisillon 3y agoi can certainly relate, my grandma died 32 y.o. to tuberculosis
- Macha 3y agoDifferent people face age related decline at different rates. My two grandmothers are in their 70s and 90s respectively. It's the one in her 70s who is increasingly limited in her capabilities. The one in her 90s on the other hand is broadly fine. The things she is not sufficient with are mostly things that women 70-40 years ago in my country were not expected to handle so she never learned to, rather than age related decline.
- dghughes 3y agoYeah it is amazing to not only be mobile but coherent. I've seen people much younger (70s) not able to get around or even understand you or having trouble communicating. Some people here go into an old age home in their 50s. My own grandmother was dead by age 64 of a stroke, her husband (my grandfather) died age 52 of emphysema. My other grandparents were in an old age home by their 60s died at ages 85 and 92. My mom is 80 and pretty mobile buys groceries but has bad hearing but won't get hearing aids. My Dad died at age 78 of IPF a lung disease after a 20 year battle. Since my Dad died I'm amazed at elderly who walking around no glasses, no mobility issues. Then again some elderly I knew looked good but had many problems they just didn't complain of their ills, then one day their died in their sleep (a few did like that).
- 3y ago
- thih9 3y ago> says she is looking forward to her next flight in the autumn. By then she will be 102 - and perhaps by then the airline computers will have caught on to her real age. I doubt it. More like she will be treated as a 2 year old and assigned her own seat.
- vidarh 3y agoSeat assignment is mostly independent of age. A child 2 or above must have a seat, but a child under two will have one if you pay. If she has been flying for free by exploiting being treated as under two, that'd have made for a much more entertaining article, though.
- seydor 3y agoThe Y2Hundred problem
- lopatin 3y agoMy name has a funny spelling. Aleksandr, with a "dr" at the end. Once when I was 9 I got a borading pass that read "Dr. Aleksan <last name>". My parents (both programmers) got quite the kick out of that.
- n_plus_1_acc 3y agoThat issue is well-known to airline staff as It's relatively common. Still stupid.
- OJFord 3y agoI wouldn't be surprised if that is the representation that would be used if 'Dr Aleksan' were correct, I recall some funky stuff like that from a post here I think a while ago describing some of the quirks and ways it has to continue working for interop (but I think the post was about doing what could be done to update/modernise/fix, I'll try to find it). And certainly I've had 'Oliverjames', so it would only have to be that it becomes 'Aleksan Dr' (and before that concatenation) to complete the picture.
- miki123211 3y agoThis is not even the only case. The Arabic name Amr is often turned into Mr. A, which is an even bigger problem if your airline's website doesn't accept single-letter first names. This happens due to an ancient data exchange protocol called airline TTY, which doesn't contain an "honorific" field and has no room for extension. In their eternal wisdom, American regulators completely ignored this fact and started requiring airlines to process honorifics after 9/11. The only available workaround was sticking the honorific at the end of the name. When you book a flight that doesn't have anything to do with the US, this data might or might not be included, but downstream systems don't know if it is or not. If it is not and your name ends with an honorific, the honorific gets stripped.
- fy20 3y agoI wonder if anyone called Yasir (male Arabic name) has been upgraded, due to the name being interpreted as Sir Ya.
- dguest 3y agoI wonder how many people will overflow to -127 years old before we fix the 8 bit signed ints (and if life expectancy ever gets that high).
- nkrisc 3y agoSeems within the realm of possibility that it will happen at least once. Several people having come within ~15 years of that already. Of course the odds of reaching 128 fall off drastically with each year nearer, I’m sure.
- BodyCulture 3y agoI was not able to use the online checkin of TUI on Saturday, got a JS syntax error which broke the form processing. Service person on the phone told me they have no IT support on weekends, so the problem persists until Monday at least. Airline managers are a threat to our safety nowadays, the whole industry needs a reset.
- rwmj 3y agoI'm confused why the slight inconvenience of having to check in when you arrive at the airport is a "threat to our safety nowadays" and "the whole industry needs a reset".
- vidarh 3y agoMaybe the bigger issue is that they admitted to having no IT support on weekends, and consider that the specific problem is just a canary.
- jonathanlydall 3y agoIn South Africa our national I.D. (Identity Document) numbers, which you are given at birth or given when becoming a resident, starts with YYMMDD. When I was working on a hotel management system a while back and implemented logic of automatically determining date of birth from an I.D. number I had to think about this exact kind of problem. Not sure if it was privacy laws, or that children always need to be checked in under their parent's details, but the hotel chain had a rule where they would never capture anything except the first name of guests under the age of 16, meaning that only if a South African guest was 116 years or older would it incorrectly assume the wrong age, which would be exceedingly rare and according to [1], not possible for at least 5 more years. Airlines however need to capture details of passengers of any age, so our solution could not be used there. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_pe...
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe] Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40185903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40185903
- bithead 3y agoThey're probably still using USAS. Written in 1969. In COBOL. Someone at Sabre claimed the booking software had been rewritten in Java. I worked at a place that had over 350 people working in airline booking and saw that product in action. It was a Uniscope terminal emulator running in Java. USAS is Unisys software for airline booking, and from someone in upper management in Unisys from a party a few years all Unisys does now is train people in COBOL to keep the 1969 booking code working. Unisys system probably still have Uniscope terminal code and drivers, just like most linux system still do VT100, 101, 200, etc terminal emulation. I recognized the Uniscope terminal emulator because I used to install them, and wrote some basic db front ends in a Unisys coding system called 'Scop' - an XML-like way of building quick multi-db input screens. It has a particularly characteristic look which is what the Sabre java client running in the browser looked exactly like.
- ck2 3y agovaguely related: if you are flying around January 19, 2038 you have far more faith in your fellow coders than I ever did