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Airline Ticketing System Keeps Mistaking a 101-Year-Old Woman for a 1-Year-Old (bbc.com) 121

Posted by EditorDavid from the flight-risks dept.
Though it's long past Y2K, another date-related bug is still with us, writes Slashdot reader Bruce66423, sharing this report from the BBC.

"A 101-year-old woman keeps getting mistaken for a baby, because of an error with an airline's booking system." The problem occurs because American Airlines' systems apparently cannot compute that Patricia, who did not want to share her surname, was born in 1922, rather than 2022.... [O]n one occasion, airport staff did not have transport ready for her inside the terminal as they were expecting a baby who could be carried...

[I]t appears the airport computer system is unable to process a birth date so far in the past — so it defaulted to one 100 years later instead... But she is adamant the IT problems will not put her off flying, and 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.
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Airline Ticketing System Keeps Mistaking a 101-Year-Old Woman for a 1-Year-Old More

Airline Ticketing System Keeps Mistaking a 101-Year-Old Woman for a 1-Year-Old

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  • Y2K tech debt (Score:5, Insightful)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Sunday April 28, 2024 @11:57PM (#64431866)

    When Y2K happened, people came up with all kinds of hacks to predict dates. Knowing how cheap companies are, a lot of that stuff is likely still running unchanged. I remember back then a lot of times we'd say "this shit won't be an issue for a couple decades, it'll get replaced or rewritten by then"... you know when you're young it feels like you won't get old ever .. like a decade will take forever to go by.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You'd think the IT industry would have learned their lessons with y2k but I still see people using 2 digit years in new development work. They'll get a surprise in 2035 when a lot of hacks switch centuries on them unexpectedly.

    • Re:Y2K tech debt (Score:5, Insightful)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Monday April 29, 2024 @12:43AM (#64431938)

      you know when you're young it feels like you won't get old ever ..

      The next stage (speaking from experience) is "How can I be 60? In my head I still feel like I'm in my 20s! My knees, on the other hand, ..."

      • I'm early 50s and my knees haven't felt this good since I was a teen.

        Of course, I went from 180lbs then to close to 300 and a few years back started loosing it all again, so back down to 190....

      • For me it started with the hair (gray then developed a bald spot) in my late 30s. After that was my near sight. It started to go in my early 40s and was basically gone by 46. I now have a pair of cheaters in every room of the house...

        I am now approaching 50 and I am just starting to develop an ache in my left knee due to sleep position at night.... I can only imagine that this will continue to progress.

      • Re:Y2K tech debt (Score:4, Funny)

        by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Monday April 29, 2024 @03:05PM (#64433704)

        I hate it when that creepy old guy stares out of the mirror at me.

    • Re:Y2K tech debt (Score:5, Funny)

      by RevRagnarok ( 583910 ) on Monday April 29, 2024 @05:04AM (#64432238) Homepage Journal

      2038 hunched in the corner, rubbing its bony little hands in anticipation...

      • "Bony little hands"? I thought that eunuchs were supposed to be plump, not bony?

      • I'm pretty sentimental here; I think of 2038 as a kind of gift or inheritance being bequeathed down from one generation to the next, from the programmers who made an absolute killing from panicked corporations that suddenly were held to ransom by the inevitable aging of software.

    • Re:Y2K tech debt (Score:5, Informative)

      by dvice ( 6309704 ) on Monday April 29, 2024 @08:12AM (#64432548)

      A lot of people claimed that people warning about y2k were wrong, because planes did not fall from the sky and hell did not break lose, but they don't know how much effort people did back then to prevent those issues from happening.

      • We saw it all again with COVID. Intangible consequences, if they don't happen (or sometimes even when they do), remain intangible. At least the panic for Y2K was mostly only needed in advance.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

        In retrospect, perhaps it'd have been better if everything ended back then.

    • I can attest to that. There's a decent amount of COBOL code in some of our local programs that is using 2 digits with the logic that 78 (when the system was first installed) is 20 + number and greater than 78 is 19 + number.

      That was good enough for the "operations" fields (eg when something happened, or a bill date) but it was incredibly sloppy and would eventually break in 2078. I'm thinking we'll bee off that software by then and if not I don't particularly care myself.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      When Y2K happened, people came up with all kinds of hacks to predict dates. Knowing how cheap companies are, a lot of that stuff is likely still running unchanged. I remember back then a lot of times we'd say "this shit won't be an issue for a couple decades, it'll get replaced or rewritten by then"... you know when you're young it feels like you won't get old ever .. like a decade will take forever to go by.

      Yeah, that's what people said back in the 60s and 70s - that the code wouldn't be running in 1999.

      • What's odd is that there was plenty of separation between frontend and backend code even then (mainframe vs. terminal). We actually need to be better at planning for certain backend code to be running for a century or more. The basics don't change. Or when they do, it's so piecemeal that you might as well be maintaining the original code. It seems less plausible now, but few programming languages haven't had breaking changes in the past decade. And security patches for versions before the breaking chan

    • Re:Y2K tech debt (Score:4, Informative)

      by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Monday April 29, 2024 @02:49PM (#64433676)

      I was at a medical device company, and some there naively felt that 2 digits for years was all you needed, or that signed 32-bit unix time was good enough. Except that if you need to enter a patient's birth date that it wasn't going to work for a large number of actual living people. Sometimes I'd get blank stares, other times they'd claim it was such a very tiny number of people who were over 90 that it didn't matter.

      It's a problem all over with software designers - they don't want to talk to real experts and assume that they are expert enough themselves. A common problem is assuming they are experts on times and dates. After all, they learned how to tell time back in kindergarten, how hard can time be?? Then they screw it up badly.

      And there's the old software, no one wants to fix the old stuff, not even airlines. They paid a lot of money for the original buggy version, and they don't want to pay more to keep it updated.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tyr07 ( 8900565 )

      It's common in a lot of companies, they're figuring they'll have exited the company by the time the bill comes due so to speak, and they'll have collected their bonuses and left.

    • Back in the late 80s, I was learning to write code and I was told to write the date in 2 digit formats. I thought that was stupid. They thought the code would be gone by then. I write code to last forever. Apparently, it is lasting forever.

      It is only short sighted folks who keep using kludges instead of doing the real work. Too bad there is no eugenics program for that rather than skin and hair color.

  • It appears that whoever designed the ticket booking software for American Airlines couldn't imagine someone living beyond 100...or if they did that that they would ever take an airline flight.
    • Of course they didn't. Just look at their math scores, they probably thought any age over 100 was an imaginary number. *rimshot*

    • So negative! It is working well for 99.99999....% of passengers.

    • Isn't all that airline and air traffic related stuff still stuck in the 70s? And where it is not, it has to be compatible to systems stuck in the 70s? What about non-ASCII letters in your name? Or at least case sensitive passenger names? On my tickets, my name and middle name get mushed into something unreadable that has nothing to do with my name.

  • Software bugs in wide release that don't get discussed publicly are just like this one. There they are, even if logged, to languish as a "feature". That's an industry standard.

    • It *is* a feature.

      Children under the age of 3 get to travel free as long as they're accompanied by an adult, surely.

      She just has to invite a grandchild along and she can travel anywhere at no cost. Why is she complaining? :)

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        She may not want to sit in her grandchild's lap for the duration of the flight. The grandchild may not want that either.

      • Yes but they don't get a seat. If you want a seat for your child you have to pay. Otherwise they are lap infants. If the flight isn't full, the flight attendants will often give you a seat for the baby but it's not guaranteed.

  • You think they've still got some 40-year-old computers hidden deep in their datacenters, still using the 2-year dates that used to be the norm back then?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dwywit ( 1109409 )

      IBM is smarter than that - it probably runs on or more of their mainframes, and there's a tipping point with those, where annual maintenance on an older machine exceeds the lease on a new one.

      The computers are probably relatively new, the software is demonstrably not. It's a bit of a curse with those things, they're so backwards-compatible that all you have to do is swap out the hardware for new stuff without ever having to touch the application code, so it leads to laziness.

      But yes, you probably know all t

      • I think it was IBM mainframe which basically promised that if the COBOL ran on Gen 'x', it would run on nearly any generation of their mainframes. And it wouldn't even need to be recompiled. Good if you've lost the source.

        Fujitsu have, or are just about to, exit the Mainframe market. Expect this market to cool down and the rate of progress at the top end to slow, not to mention the prices will increase. Its the IBM way or the highway, now.

        I think Porter would have a field day. You have this IT system runnin

        • Unisys mainframes are used by a good number of Airlines and they are still building mainframes.
          Their technology has been ahead of its time in mainframe days.

  • Every coder on the planet who is over 40 years was around either coding or mucking around with PCs when Y2K happened. Or more accurately, when all the work was done to mitigate it.

    But we don't hire those people any more do we? We want nice young blood that is full of great ideas.

    Now, I'm not saying that there aren't plenty of young coders who know to use a 4-digit year, but obviously, this company didn't hire them.

    Suffer in ya jocks.

    • There is no way a young person wrote that code. They would have used strings to represent dates.

      • Or maybe use an actual date variable,

        I figure the problem is that it does indeed get converted into a string as some point - a string consisting of 2 characters for the age, so 101-> 01, so when it goes back into the more modern systems to spit out a work order for picking up the 1 year old...

        Personally speaking, if there isn't a date variable/class available, I think that I'd tend to reach for int before a string for dates. Only switch to string when I'm looking to output the data.

      • Isn't the mainframe zoned decimal format effectively a (weird) string?

    • More that a lot of managers want pliable individuals who'll do what they're told because they don't yet know any better and are quite happy to work stupid hours because they don't have a family and/or they're not confident enough to tell the pointy hair that no they're not going to work until 8pm every day and to go do one.

    • I think you need to speak to your therapist again and up your meds doses.

  • Have them look at it this way (Score:5, Funny)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Monday April 29, 2024 @01:15AM (#64431972)

    She's only 29 -- for the past 72 years.

  • Top sales associate at the Caterpillar tractor sales department of Omaha, Nebraska. Unfortunately much taller than purported, and not at all skilled in the arts of war.

  • Millennium bug or age display field? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bruce66423 ( 1678196 ) on Monday April 29, 2024 @03:49AM (#64432148)

    If the display field can only show two digits, we would have the same symptoms.

  • I would start telling people I have a case of Benjamin Button syndrome. ;)

  • Grown-up people will look at her and tell her they can't treat her like a 101 year old person because the computer says she's a baby.

  • Is it really all about the age? Not having a wheelchair ready, I would have assumed that would be a separate request regardless of age. Similarly I wonder at the "transport", as other than the plane itself, I'm not accustomed to any sort of intra-airport transport that has seating specifically counted.

  • Airlines are super cheap and change resistant (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Zontar_Thing_From_Ve ( 949321 ) on Monday April 29, 2024 @09:11AM (#64432652)
    I had a job in the 1990s working for a company most of you would have never heard of, but we got most of our money from the airline industry. It was a good job and I left it in the early 2000s basically to chase a higher paycheck. I can tell you that it was amazing to see how resistant to change and cheap our airline customers were. I'm not going to go into specifics but I can tell you all that if you knew what they were paying us to do for them, your jaw would drop. I don't want to name it because they may still be stupid enough to pay for it today, but basically they were paying us to do something for them that they could have done themselves for a fraction of the cost - that's how change resistant they are. Updating computer systems costs money and they don't like to spend money. Delta Airlines did a major IT upgrade in the 2010s and this was after major meltdowns that hurt them. Remember how in recent years Southwest Airlines kept having major iT meltdowns? Well, that was Delta in the 2010s and earlier. Delta finally got a CEO who pushed through a major upgrade. And Southwest has finally started upgrading their ancient scheduling system that kept melting down and cost them a fortune in lost revenue. So yeah, I'm not surprised at all that American Airlines only uses 2 digits for a person's age. American is easily the worst run major airline in the USA, being change resistant, cheap and stupid, so I would expect nothing less.

  • ...(but shouldn't be) by the meticulous, nearly atomic-level precision modern commercial systems can manage and deal with massive amounts of data when it comes to TRACKING THE FUCK OUT OF US* but simple stuff like "your 2-year digit code in your ticketing disregards that some people who travel live more than 100 years" never seems to get fixed.

    *I mean that literally: when you click on some links, your info goes out on AUCTION to be bid around for which advertising they're going to show you, they have the au

  • The reason the airline is collecting DOB is to comply with TSA's "Secure Flight." Secure Flight involved a TSA mandate to collect gender and DOB to reduce the TSA's press humiliation from stopping and harassing every person named David Nelson, Robert Johnson, and some other common names, because the names "matched" the TSA's secret due-process-free No-Fly-List. (NFL). The NFL grew from under 600 names in 2001 to over 81,000 names in 2016.

    Implementing the DOB check reduced the false positives enough that t

  • Clever hack for dumb system (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Miamicanes ( 730264 ) on Monday April 29, 2024 @12:50PM (#64433290)

    Airline systems tend to have problems because they were written prior to 1980, when things like BCD were still commonplace.

    For software written after approximately 1980 (and definitely after the dawn of 8-bit personal computers), the "Y2K problem" was rarely about date-storage and calculation, and was mainly a usability and character-mode UI problem.

    First, let's get one thing clear: programmers in the 1980s and 1990s weren't oblivious to the year 2000. Behind the scenes, most programs written after ~1980 either represented dates as 32-bit epoch time values, or represented years as a byte offset from some reference year. The result is, they were generally good for dates between around 1800..2050 or 1850..2100.

    The REAL problem was the ubiquity of 80x25 character-mode displays. Especially back in the 1980s, wasting two characters of screen real estate on a seemingly redundant '19' was intolerable. The arrival of Windows and proportional fonts made programmers more willing to start using 4-digit dates starting in the early 1990s... but for charactermode programs, there was intense resistance even in 1995, with 2000 less than 5 years away.

    In many cases, Y2K mitigation was REALLY an excuse to scare management into approving the replacement of DOS and terminal-based programs with Windows. The truth is, almost all programs written after the 1970s HAD arcane work-arounds to let users enter pre-1900 and post-2000 years, and they weren't really a secret... just ugly and kludgy. Like, entering/rendering dates after 2000 using a letter as the first character (ex: a0=2000, b1=2011, c2=2022, etc). Or rendering dates like 2004 as 19104 (naively printing it as "19" plus the byte-offset from 1900).

    The irony is, a lot of systems that were supposedly remediated for y2k ACTUALLY have ticking time-bomb deadlines of 2038, or sometime around 2050 or 2100 that have been mostly forgotten about by now.

  • "Hey boss, didn't our grandfathers solve this problem back in the 20th century?"

    "You're not being much of a team player there, Timmy. You know the holidays are coming up and there's nothing that gets us moist like Christmas layoffs."

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