Narrative:

We were cleared by ground to push; but the push crew had some difficulty and ended up breaking the tow bar. We wrote-up the break and eventually were towed forward towards the gate; both to clear the taxiway we were blocking and for the mechanics to inspect the nose gear. Inspection complete we made sure we had the new maintenance release prior to pushback. On taxi out we also received an updated final weight manifest. All as it should be. There appeared to be some confusion about out and in times. Airborne it became apparent that someone had adjusted our original out time; closer to the time we taxied the second time. This was a surprise as we never opened a cabin door during the nose gear inspection; even though we had pulled back towards the gate. Times in the ACARS reflected such. We had a discussion via ACARS/satcom with dispatch and maintenance over an unrelated airborne write up; and brought up the discrepancy with the times. Dispatch claimed an adjustment would be made to address our concerns that pay and flight-time legality for the crew might be affected. A short time later; and likely due to that adjustment; or maybe the airborne write up; we started getting multiple messages over ACARS claiming our current release was invalid for takeoff. Further discussions had dispatch first agree with this assessment; but upon further investigation realize that we did in fact have the proper paperwork for departure. I'll wager that the discrepancy between the manually adjusted out/in times and what the plane was thinking (never blocked in) precipitated this issue. Dispatch claimed it might be due to a glitch in the maintenance computer.

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Original NASA ASRS Text

Title: B767 flight crew experiences a tow bar break during push back and is pulled back to the gate for maintenance inspection. The Out time is manually adjusted; which produces a discrepancy in the release document and a great deal of message traffic once airborne.

Narrative: We were cleared by Ground to push; but the push crew had some difficulty and ended up breaking the tow bar. We wrote-up the break and eventually were towed forward towards the gate; both to clear the taxiway we were blocking and for the mechanics to inspect the nose gear. Inspection complete we made sure we had the new Maintenance release prior to pushback. On taxi out we also received an updated final weight manifest. All as it should be. There appeared to be some confusion about out and in times. Airborne it became apparent that someone had adjusted our original out time; closer to the time we taxied the second time. This was a surprise as we never opened a cabin door during the nose gear inspection; even though we had pulled back towards the gate. Times in the ACARS reflected such. We had a discussion via ACARS/SATCOM with Dispatch and Maintenance over an unrelated airborne write up; and brought up the discrepancy with the times. Dispatch claimed an adjustment would be made to address our concerns that pay and Flight-Time legality for the crew might be affected. A short time later; and likely due to that adjustment; or maybe the airborne write up; we started getting multiple messages over ACARS claiming our current Release was invalid for takeoff. Further discussions had Dispatch first agree with this assessment; but upon further investigation realize that we did in fact have the proper paperwork for departure. I'll wager that the discrepancy between the manually adjusted out/in times and what the plane was thinking (never blocked in) precipitated this issue. Dispatch claimed it might be due to a glitch in the maintenance computer.

Data retrieved from NASA's ASRS site as of July 2013 and automatically converted to unabbreviated mixed upper/lowercase text. This report is for informational purposes with no guarantee of accuracy. See NASA's ASRS site for official report.