How it works

How money moves on Hangar Bay

Two ways to pay, and you choose. Escrow.com can hold the money on any sale at any price, or the two of you can settle it directly.

Escrow.com checkout is not open yet. Everything below describes how it will work, and it is built and tested, but it cannot take a real payment today. Two things have to happen first, and neither is code: Escrow.com confirming in writing that used reserves and AADs are gear they will handle, and finishing their verification of our business.

So every sale on Hangar Bay today settles directly between the two of you, exactly as described further down. We are not involved in the payment, no funds are held, and there is no protection or dispute process from us. We would rather say that plainly than let you assume otherwise.

Two ways to pay

Escrow.com holds itAvailable on every sale at any price. They hold the buyer's payment until the buyer accepts the gear or the inspection window closes

Settle it yourselvesAlways available. Hangar Bay is not involved in payment at all

There used to be a $5,000 floor here, and escrow was refused below it. That was us deciding for you. The arithmetic behind it was sound, because Escrow's flat minimum really does make their fee a large slice of a small sale, but we had already made an exception for international sales at any price. So the same $300 sale could pay that fee to Copenhagen and was forbidden from paying it to Melbourne. Geography was making a decision that belongs to whoever is spending the money.

Now the fee is simply shown before either of you commits. The number worth watching is about $1,923: below that, Escrow's flat minimum means you pay more than their headline rate. On a $300 sale it works out around 17 percent. Plenty of people will still pay that to a stranger they have never met, and plenty will not. Both are reasonable.

Settling it yourselves

Hangar Bay is not involved in payment for these sales. No funds are held, and there is no protection or dispute process from us. If it goes wrong, we cannot get your money back and we do not compensate you.

This is not new and not a downgrade: it is how gear has always changed hands, at the dropzone and everywhere else. Talk to the seller through the questions on the listing before you commit, and settle up however works for the two of you.

If you are both near the same dropzone, doing the handover in person is the simplest way to take the risk out of it, because you are paying and collecting at the same moment while looking at the thing. That is a suggestion about where to meet, not an inspection service. Nobody at the dropzone is checking the gear on our behalf, and whether a canopy is airworthy stays a rigger's call.

Escrow.com holding the money

These sales run through Escrow.com (Payments Australia Pty Ltd, AFSL 501215), a licensed escrow company with no connection to Hangar Bay beyond this arrangement. The buyer pays Escrow.com, they hold it, the seller ships, and the buyer has a fixed window to check the gear before it releases. Hangar Bay is the broker on that transaction and takes a 3 percent fee at completion, paid by the seller; the buyer pays Escrow.com's own fee, on their own terms. That is our only involvement. We never receive, hold or control the purchase money itself, in this lane or the other one.

Who holds the moneyEscrow.com, under their own licence, not us

Inspection window7 days standard, 30 days for gear that flies you or saves you (rigs, containers, canopies, AADs). It starts when you mark the gear received, not when it was posted, so slow freight cannot eat it. We set this length as broker; Escrow.com runs the process

DisputesHandled through Escrow.com's own process, on their terms, not ours

What it does not coverWhether the gear is airworthy. Escrow protects against a seller who does not send the thing, nothing about the thing itself

The 30-day categories are longer because a rigger inspection is a booked job, not a glance, and inspecting a reserve consumes the repack, which you should expect to pay for. Full detail on how Escrow.com's own process works, including how to raise something with them, is on their site.

Before you buy: check on the table, not in the air

A test jump is not an inspection. On a jump you find out what the gear does after it opens, and by then your options are the ones you brought with you. Mis-routed lines, a brake setting nobody checked, hardware nobody looked at: those show up at line stretch, not on the ground.

Everything worth checking is checked on a table: serials, dates, the data card, the line set, repairs. A rigger does that in an afternoon once you are in the queue, and it is worth doing whichever lane the sale is in, because the money side and the gear side are two separate questions with two separate answers.

If you fly it before you have checked it, you have accepted it, on any sale, through any lane. That is not a rule Hangar Bay enforces; it is just what accepting something means. Ask your questions on the listing first, book the rigger, and let your own instructor or coach tell you whether the wing suits you before you take it up. Nobody here needs you rushed onto a canopy.

Worth knowing if a sale ever needs to be raised as a dispute with Escrow.com: what actually gets resolved is a factual mismatch between the listing and the thing that arrived, the kind a rigger will put in writing. A serial that does not match, a reserve serial that does not match its packing data card, undisclosed deployments or repairs, a data card absent or with gaps, dates or life expired, a line set that does not match the factory trim chart, an undisclosed modification. Photographs of labels, cards and serials, plus an inspection invoice, are worth keeping regardless.

Rules for sellers

Declare the historyDeployments, repairs, reline dates, the data card. A gap is honest; a wrong claim is a dispute

Sealed-reserve gearState the last repack date, so a buyer can see cycle remaining as a plain fact

Never advertise test jumps"Test jumps welcome" and anything like it is banned phrasing on Hangar Bay, in listings, offers and messages

Serial disciplineRecorded at listing, never published, kept out of photos

A held-funds product we looked at, and set aside

We looked seriously at Hangar Bay running its own protected-payment lane for sales in between, with Hangar Bay itself deciding when a payment provider released the money. That needs a proper regulatory opinion before a line of it ships, and we are not going to launch a financial product without getting that right. It is a live idea for later, not something in progress today. What is above is the design we have built and tested, not a service you can use yet: see the note at the top of this page for what is actually open today.

Fee detail for sellers: selling on Hangar Bay. Something to raise about a sale: support.