100-Year-Old Woman Mistakenly Identified as Unaccompanied Minor on Flights Due to Glitch with Birth Year, 1923
"I’m going through my second childhood," jokes the centenarian in an Instagram video
At 100 years old, Mildred Kirschenbaum still enjoys traveling — but since reaching her milestone birthday last August, she’s had an unusual experience flying.
The centenarian, who once owned a travel agency in New York and is still a registered agent, says she now shows up as an “unescorted minor” due to a glitch in the airlines’ computer systems.
“The code is two digits for the month, two digits for the day, and two digits for the year. I was born in 1923. So I put in 23,” Mildred explains in a video posted on the Instagram account of her daughter, Gayle.
“Soon as I check in, I’m an unescorted minor,” she continues. “The supervisor has to come. And they have to see me right through security. No one seems to know how to correct it.”
Mildred, who’s previously gone viral on social media for sharing advice on life and longevity, adds with her trademark humor, “I’m going through my second childhood.”
While the birth year error requires extra time to sort out at the airport before boarding, she tries not to stress too much over it.
“I allow myself a half hour at the counter,” she tells PEOPLE. “I'm not going to get myself worked up with it.”
The Florida resident shared the video ahead of a May trip to New York, where Gayle lives. But she’s taken multiple flights since turning 100, including traveling to London in September for a transatlantic cruise. And a quick jaunt to New York for an appearance on Sherri, hosted by Sherri Shepherd, just last week.
While the mother-daughter duo often fly Delta, they say the problem isn’t limited to one airline — nor was it caused by a booking mistake on Mildred's part.
“I was busy blaming her, saying, ‘Let me see what you did. You probably put it in incorrectly,’” Gayle tells PEOPLE.
However, Gayle then called a travel agency her mom is connected to and was told, “That's how it is. It's two digits in the system."
She adds that it now happens “every time" Mildred flies, no matter how they book the flight.
Delta confirmed to PEOPLE that because of how several legacy, industry-wide back-end booking and ticketing systems are built, the fields for customers' birth years only have the capacity for two digits instead of four.
"While it’s clear this customer is young at heart, she’ll simply have to check in with a friendly Delta agent at the airport to get her boarding pass," a representative for the airline told PEOPLE in a statement. "We appreciate her understanding and we’d love to hear her points on longevity and why she likes to travel as Delta marks our own 100th birthday next year.”
Gayle says she thinks the video she posted of her mom "has woken up the industry,” noting, “I'm hearing from people in the aviation IT area saying, ‘We're working on this.’”
Gayle has also heard from other relatives of centenarians who’ve had similar experiences.
“This happened to my mom too,” one commenter, who said her own mother was born in 1913, wrote on Gayle’s Instagram post.
Gayle says her social media followers also appreciated her mom’s playful take on the frustrating situation.
“They all love her attitude,” she says. “She makes light of everything.”
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Gayle describes Mildred — with whom she recently collaborated on a book, Mildred's Mindset: Wisdom from a Woman Centenarian — as “incredibly resilient and fearless” and “absolutely not her age.”
“Travel is in our blood, I have to tell you,” says Gayle, a photographer, writer and filmmaker, who made the 2015 documentary Look at Us Now, Mother! “We have had great adventures all over the world.”
“When you don't have this fear, you get to enjoy a lot of things in life and have a lot of adventures,” she adds.
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