Air carrier flight crew reported a communication breakdown between flight crew and Dispatch regarding the missing final DG summary at gate pushback. Upon tug disconnect the DG form arrived which enabled the flight crew to send the acknowledgement form and depart with no further issues.
Synopsis
Air carrier flight crew reported a communication breakdown between flight crew and Dispatch regarding the missing final DG summary at gate pushback. Upon tug disconnect the DG form arrived which enabled the flight crew to send the acknowledgement form and depart with no further issues.
Narrative
I did receive an ACARS message saying check printer for DG"; none came up; so I went to the ACARS "Message received" and there wasn't anything there. Continued to preflight the FMC and ACARS; First Officer (FO) was outside preflighting the aircraft. We were accomplishing an aircraft swap; terminal change; and doing OE (Operating Evaluation) in 1:13 scheduled swap [time] which added to the workload; but I felt we were handling it well by dividing duties and briefing the threat. When requesting push the message came up not to push without sending the dangerous goods acknowledgement code but we had not received any Preliminary or Final DG so I assumed they did not load it; and continued the push. We continued to discuss the strange message/situation and I asked push crew if they had loaded any. They replied in the affirmative and we called operations telling them we hadn't received any DG paperwork and they stated they would email it to us. Quick thinking FO went to the FOM Quick Reference Guide (QRG) and got the DG code which produced a Final DG!"
Second reporter narrative
We arrived to the airplane with 35-40 mins prior to departure time due to a tight plane swap. As we initiated preflight procedures we had issues with ACARS initialization. We attempted to initialize ACARS twice with limited success. The main issue was lack of the route being uploaded to the FMC and missing ACARS messages. Eventually I manually loaded the route into the FMC; while winds and take off data was successfully uplinked via ACARS. At some point we received a message DG SENT CHECK PRINTER". At this point we checked all the received paperwork off the printer and all the received ACARS messages. No primary or final dangerous goods reports were found. While calling for pushback clearence we received an ACARS stating that we didn't accept final DG via ACARS dangerous goods acknowledgement code. This caused us to double check with pushback personnel via voice about the hazmat status; pushback crew confirmed that hazmat was indeed loaded aboard. Upon tug disconnect; we sent a code "DG" and obtained final dg summary."
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Source: NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System (public domain). Reports are voluntary submissions and are not verified by NASA.