Airline mistakes 101-year-old woman for a baby

Patricia was travelling from Chicago with American Airlines.

A 101-year-old woman is fed up with being constantly mistaken for an infant due to an airline booking error.

Patricia from the US was born in 1922 but, due to a booking system error, when she turns up the airline is expecting a 1-year-old infant born in 2022.

Flying from Chicago to Marquetter, Michigan, with American Airlines last week, she and her daughter Kriss were able to laugh off the latest mix-up but the BBC reported that this isn’t the first time the error has happened.

While Patricia has been reliant on help from family to travel for the past four years, even she thought it was odd when the airline expected her to sit on her daughter’s lap.

“It was funny that they thought I was only a little child and I’m an old lady!” she told BBC reporter Joe Tidy, who happened to be sharing the same flight.

“The same thing happened last year and they were also expecting a child and not me,” she said.

This was in spite of paying an adult fare for the seat.

Not expecting many centenarians to travel, some airline booking systems will only accept a two-digit age. However, with an ageing and increasingly mobile population, this could be a growing problem.

Kris said that it had caused issues before, with the airline failing to arrange a wheelchair for her mother - whom was mistaken for a baby - meaning they were left to wait onboard the plane for a chair.

In spite of the mix-up, Patricia said she was looking forward to her next flight later this year, when she would be 102.

She hoped by then the booking problem would be fixed.