What makes a large-ticket merchant explainable

An underwriter reading an aviation file is answering one question: if this merchant stopped operating tomorrow, how much unearned customer money would be outstanding, and who pays it back? Everything requested is a way of getting at that.

Reading the requests that way makes them stop feeling arbitrary.

What each item is really asking

• ·Operating authority, where applicable: can you legally provide what customers are paying for?
• ·The fleet list: do you control the aircraft, or is a third party required for you to deliver?
• ·Deposit terms and booking window: how far ahead of delivery does money arrive?
• ·Cancellation terms as published, not as described: what does the customer believe happens if they cancel?
• ·The customer agreement: what have you actually promised?
• ·Processing history: has this pattern held before, and what happened when it did not?

The thing that decides it

Consistency. The website, the contract, the application and the descriptor should describe one business. Most aviation files that stall do so not because an answer was bad but because two answers disagreed — a site advertising services the application never mentioned, or a cancellation policy that differs from the one in the contract.

Nobody is looking for perfection. They are looking for a merchant whose description of itself holds up.