Medium Large Transport; Low Wing; 2 Turbojet Eng
Flight Crew Multiengine; Flight Crew Air Transport Pilot (ATP); Flight Crew Instrument
Time Pressure; Other / Unknown
Deviation / Discrepancy - Procedural Hazardous Material Violation; Deviation / Discrepancy - Procedural Weight And Balance
Flight Crew Overcame Equipment Problem; General Maintenance Action
Human Factors; Procedure
We were getting ready to push from the gate. Baggage information comes through our ACARS. We both looked at each other when we saw there were 8 checked bags and 515lbs of cargo in the FWD compartment. At this point the boarding door is closed; jet bridge pulled away and we are #3 for deice. [Name] immediately calls to the ramp and asks what in the world they put on our airplane that weighs 515lbs. They told us it was blood. He called Dispatch to see if we were filed as Medevac. The odd thing was there was no paperwork and we were not notified until we got the bag count from ramp. After looking in the manual it says blood is not required to have paperwork but what we were concerned about was how the temperature of the blood was regulated. If there was dry ice being used to keep the packages cool why was there no paperwork notifying us that there was dry ice.
Air carrier pilot reported last minute cargo upload which included Hazmat items with no flight crew notification.