from Hacker News

Airline keeps mistaking 101-year-old woman for baby

by user20180120 on 4/28/24, 4:07 AM with 18 comments

• by chmod775 on 4/28/24, 8:40 AM

  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

• by Pyrodogg on 4/28/24, 1:04 PM

  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/...

• by chiph on 4/28/24, 1:34 PM

  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.

• by ryan-c on 4/28/24, 9:44 AM

  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?

• by netsharc on 4/28/24, 8:47 AM

  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?

• by 1letterunixname on 4/28/24, 7:43 AM

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