Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/29/american-airlines-keeps-treating-101-year-old-lady-like-a-baby-thanks-to-computer-glitch.html
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Children are innocent, yeah
Teenagers fucked up in the head
Adults are only more fucked up
And elderlies are like children
(“Pets” – Porno for Pyros)
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That’s not a glitch. That’s a really basic programming error someone made.
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Somewhere deep inside the old parts of their software, there’s a section that’s chained to the 80 column punch card format, even if they haven’t used them in decades, and they can only spare two digits for age.
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someone allocated only two characters to store passenger’s age. i’m not saying it was a COBOL ALLOCATE statement that did it, but i’d put down three and half brass razoos that is was a SABRE COBOLesque statement (that is, SABRE code …an ancient cousin of COBOL)
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Ok, then a programming limitation which made sense at one time, but which hasn’t made sense in at least 25 years. It’s still not a glitch. It’s working exactly how it was programmed.
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I was thinking COBOL ALLOCATE, myself; but I’ve never worked on production COBOL (let alone SABRE) code. I wouldn’t be shocked if it still is 40-year-old code.
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perhaps by then the airline computers will have caught on to her real age
Given that the computer system at fault has probably been in use for (at least) half her life, I rather suspect not.
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Old ideas are hard to kill. Like 6-digit dates in a COBOL program to save expensive storage space. Which I remember as a big Y2K project back in '99. Modern databases, more sophisticated than essentially indexed flat files, have date and datetime types.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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The airline’s refusal to learn from previous errors - preferring to let staff make the same blunder again and again - cannot be blamed on software either.
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Oh, there is no doubt.
"Have you ever booked a flight, or watched someone else do it? Typically, you would visit the airline’s website, a travel agent, or an online site such as Expedia. They have really nice graphical user interfaces in your web browser, but in fact, it just sends commands to “cryptic” systems. These form the core of the interconnected airline reservations systems, also known as the Global Distribution Systems (GDS).
These were created in the 1960s, when American Airlines wanted to provide a direct link for travel agents to make reservations on its flights. Originally written in COBOL, the system was called Sabre, the first global distribution system. Over time, other airlines joined up on the network, and today, almost all major airlines participate in the major GDS networks of Amadeus, Sabre, and Galileo. These were revolutionary at the time, as it allowed interoperability between airline systems and travel agents. "
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“No booze for children, ma’am!”
At the time that internal code was originally written, memory was expensive and processors were slow, so code was streamlined to the point where it hurt – and you have to admit, she is an edge case. Still, it should be fixed. (You would probably be surprised how much work there is for COBOL programmers patching old systems. I know a couple of companies who fly them across the country for temp jobs like this.)
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Meant to add this to my post above, but I’ll just reply to you. 
BTW, my dad was a COBOL engineer back in the day. And he worked on mainframes in general.
He’s in his 80s.
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Can she fly for free by sitting on her child’s lap?
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Yes, if that’s the cause, then it’s some old program at the heart of it, that they might be running layers of emulators to simulate the computer that simulates the computer that it originally ran on.
Did someone say rewrite it? Well… they could, but management never likes the cost to do the job properly, which can be a lot if they have to bring up the new system in parallel. Plus, the people who wrote it are long gone, people who know the language it’s written in are hard to come by, and there are decades of undocumented assumptions buried in the code that won’t be obvious. The smart ones rewrote for Y2K.
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now see a really efficient programmer would have encoded date of birth as an age minus statistical maximum lifespan at the time of the database’s inception; and then written that number in the instructions that each operator had to reverse calculate in order to make a reservation
problem solved!
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Some of the largest business systems that run COBOL include:
Healthcare: 60 million patients
Banking: 95% ATM transactions
Travel: 96% of the bookings
Social security: 60 million lines of code
Point of sale: 80% of all transactions daily
IRS: 50 million lines of code
Help us Grace Hopper, you’re our only hope.
Seriously, the easiest and safest way to do something about this will probably involve designing a working time machine.
How long until a bright spark decides to “get AI on it” and crashes worldwide banking or something?
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Flight attendants hate this one cool hack to get free crayons.
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In my neck of the woods, we like to call it “fossilized stupidity”.
To be clear: SABRE was a bloody miracle for its day. It wasn’t stupid. Sticking with its limitations was stupid.
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Several years ago, we had a contractor teaching us how to use our integrated library system, and he was nonplussed when one of the cataloging records was in ALL CAPS. I didn’t have the heart to point out to him that it was probably originally entered using the FILEDATA character set which didn’t include separate upper and lower case characters, because they didn’t want to waste space by assigning that many bits to each character.
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