Is there some meaning to the capitalization of names in this manifest?

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The airline industry was among the first large-scale adopters of heavily networked computers. For this reason they have some really really old systems running in the nooks and crannies of their infrastructure -- even though the actual hardware is not from the 1960s, some of the interfaces still are, and even some of the software may be. (They work well enough for what they're doing; changing how they work for all participants all at once would be both expensive and horrifyingly error-prone).

Therefore some reservations still pass through interfaces that don't support both upper-case and lower-case letters. When data is fed from such a system to a newer one that does have two cases, it will usually become all upper case -- but for some of the gateways someone has apparently thought (correctly) that it would be easier on the eyes to convert them to all lower case instead.

Since tickets for the aircraft can be bought all over the globe, through websites and brick-and-mortar travel agencies using reservation system hookups of various ages, the passengers on a single flight will have their information arriving through a lot of different channels.

In the manifest you link to you can see that the PNRs for passengers 41 and 42 are not the same. So even though they sit together and are probably related, they booked their tickets separately, and probably from different agents that use different systems. (They have more family on yet a third booking in the row behind them).

What this doesn't explain is that passengers 30, 31 and 116 share a PNR -- but not the capitalization style! -- with 42. And judging by the sequence numbers they all checked in together, so why is poor Jie Stephanie sitting 14 rows behind the other Gunawans? That may be lost to history.

(Based on the observations I'd hypothesize that the check-in agents may have a button that downcases the passenger name, but only one of the several agents that checked the Gunawans in care enough to use it).

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