A 101-year-old woman was mistaken for an infant passenger aboard an American Airlines flight due to a glitch in the booking system.
The amusing tale unfolded when the sprightly centenarian named Patricia was traveling with her daughter, Kris, aboard a flight from Chicago to Marquette, Michigan.
“It was funny that they thought I was only a little child and I’m an old lady!” she told BBC cyber correspondent Joe Tidy, who was also on the same Marquette-bound flight.
The crew aboard the flight expected to welcome a toddler in Patricia’s seat, but to their surprise, a woman with more than a century of life experience showed up with a boarding pass.
Joe took to social media to share the whirlwind of emotions the crew hilariously went through upon seeing Patricia, who was born in 1922.
“I’m on a flight in US and an old lady has caused confusion, hilarity and then amazement as the crew expected her to be an infant,” the cyber correspondent wrote in a tweet last week. “She is actually 101 and the computer can’t handle an age that high so just put her down as a 1 year old on the manifest. She laughed it off. Legend.”
The crew aboard the American Airlines flight were surprised to find a centenarian instead of a child
Image credits: rolandmey / Pixabay
Patricia, a former nurse, explained that the mix-up happened because the airline's booking system could not register that she was born in 1922. The system instead marks her birth year as 2022.
"My daughter made the reservation online for the ticket and the computer at the airport thought my birth date was 2022 and not 1922," Patricia told Joe.
The elderly woman said she used to travel alone until the age of 97 and has since been accompanied by family during her flight journeys.
“I have some trouble with my eyesight now so I wouldn’t want to do it on my own,” she said.
It turns out that this isn’t the first time the airline staff made arrangements for a child after the computing system registered her birth year erroneously.
The elderly woman said she used to travel alone until the age of 97 but now takes flights with family members accompanying her
“It gets better!” Joe wrote in another tweet. “Her daughter tells me this is the second time a computer has failed to believe her mum’s 1922 date of birth. Earlier on their connecting flight the crew didn’t come and help them off the plane with a wheelchair as the records showed she would be a babe in arms.”
“This lovely old lady is like a walking Millennium Bug just casing [sic] havoc where she goes with her computer-befuddling age. What a hero,” he added.
Patricia also joked about wreaking havoc among flight crew members one time last year due to the same glitch. The former nurse explained that she travels around the same time every year to visit family, and last year, she also booked an adult ticket. But instead of registering her as a 100-year-old woman, the system logged her age as a 1-year-old toddler.
BBC cyber correspondent Joe Tidy called the lovely elderly woman a hero causing "havoc" on flights
"The same thing happened last year and they were also expecting a child and not me," she told the BBC correspondent.
Amid all the confusion, the airline staff were described as kind and helpful to Patricia during both mix-ups. Nevertheless, the centenarian said, “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.”
Patricia, who doesn’t intend on stopping her air travels any time soon, said she hopes the airline's system would be fixed by the time she is 102.