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Quick summary

When the seller sits on another continent, the first message decides how long the whole transaction takes. Every question the supplier has to ask back costs a working day, sometimes two, because the reply lands after their office has closed. The fix is not a longer message — it is a message that answers the four questions a quote cannot be built without: where the part is going, what you will accept, how you can pay, and when you need it. This guide sets out what to put in a first enquiry to an overseas aircraft parts supplier so the answer comes back as a price rather than a question.

You lose days to the clock, not to the price

A buyer in Lagos writing to a stockist in the American Midwest has a window of a few hours a day in which both offices are open. If the first message omits one field, the clarification goes out at the end of your day, is read at the start of theirs, and the answer arrives after you have gone home. One missing field is one lost day. Three missing fields, spread across two exchanges each, is the week gone.

Two habits remove most of this. Check the counterparty’s working week before you plan around it — it is not Monday to Friday everywhere, and a Thursday afternoon request can sit until what you think of as Sunday. And write the message so that the supplier can answer it without you: give them permission, in the message itself, to quote alternatives rather than wait for you to approve a substitution.

Name the destination before you ask the price

A price with no destination is not a price. The same unit quoted to two cities differs by freight, by whether the seller can ship to your country at all, and by who handles clearance. Sellers who deal regularly with cross-border buyers will quote both ways if you ask, and the gap between the two numbers is often where the real decision sits.

State the delivery city and country, the airport you clear through, and which of the two shapes you want: the part handed over at the seller’s facility or their forwarder, with you arranging everything onward; or delivered to your city with the seller arranging carriage. If you want the second, say explicitly whether import duty and taxes are yours or theirs — that single sentence is the difference between a quote you can budget against and one you cannot. Our guide to routing parts through regional hubs covers how the physical path changes the answer.

What belongs in the first message

Field	What to write	What it saves
Part number	Exactly as printed on the tag or in the manual, plus any alternate	A search that matches stock instead of returning nothing
Quantity	Number of units, and whether a partial shipment helps	A partial offer instead of a refusal
Condition accepted	Every code you can use, in order of preference	Three times the stock searched
Release required	Which authority’s release, and whether dual release is needed	The mismatch found now, not at the receiving dock
Destination	City, country, clearing airport	A freight number in the first reply
Terms wanted	Handover at origin, or delivered, and who pays duty	A comparable quote
Payment	Method you can actually execute, and currency	No dead end after agreement
Need-by date	A date, and whether the aircraft is grounded	Correct priority in their queue
Who decides	Your name, role and direct contact	No routing through a shared mailbox

Units and words that do not travel

Three small things cause an outsized share of mistakes in cross-border parts correspondence.

Dates: write the month as a word. A shipment needed on 05/11 is understood two different ways on two continents, and the misunderstanding is only discovered when the part arrives late. Units: state the system you are using rather than assuming it — pressures, torques and dimensions all come in two flavours, and a converted number with no unit beside it is a guess. And condition vocabulary: the same word is used loosely across the market, so write the code you mean and, if the amount is material, add one line describing what you expect the paperwork to show. The reasons quotes for an apparently identical part come back so far apart are set out in our note on why two quotes for the same part number differ.

Say what you can pay with, not what you would prefer

The most common silent failure in a first enquiry is a payment method the buyer cannot actually execute. Agreement is reached, the invoice is issued, and then the transfer runs into an approval or an allocation problem on the buyer’s side and the deal stalls with the part already allocated.

Avoid that by putting your real constraints in the first message: the currency you can settle in, the instrument you can use, and roughly how long your side takes to release funds once an invoice is raised. A supplier who knows you need a week will hold the part for a week. A supplier who expected same-day payment will not. Where the constraint is a national one rather than a company one, our guide to currency controls and cross-border payment for parts goes through the mechanics, and the documents customs will want are covered in importing aircraft parts and the paperwork at the border.

This is also the point where a neutral settlement mechanism earns its keep. Neither side knows the other; the seller does not want to release the part before payment and the buyer does not want to send funds to a company they have never dealt with. Holding the money with a third party until the shipment is confirmed removes the standoff without either side having to extend trust it has no basis for.

One message, not six

Put the nine fields from the table into a single message, in that order, with the part number in the subject line. Keep it short — it should read as a form, not a letter. Then add one sentence that most buyers leave out and that changes the reply more than anything else: tell the supplier what you will do with the quote and by when. “I need to place this by Thursday and I am comparing three offers” gets a sharper price than silence, because it tells them the enquiry is real.

If you would rather not send the same message to twenty addresses, post it once where verified sellers see it together: the Aviatrading RFQ board puts one request in front of all of them, and the parts catalogue is worth a search first in case the unit is already listed. New requests also appear on the Aviatrading Telegram channel as they are posted. Every transaction on the platform is protected by escrow, so funds are released only once the deal closes — which is the same standoff described above, solved once rather than renegotiated with every new supplier.

Questions buyers ask us most

The listing has no ATA chapter. Does that mean the seller does not know what the part is?

No, and an empty chapter field is usually by design rather than by omission: ATA chapter numbering describes aircraft systems, not individual sellable items, which is why a chapter rarely sits on a single part record at all. On the two catalogue pages we measured, a chapter was present on 8 and on 11 positions out of every 100 — two pages of a catalogue that now runs to several thousand entries, so read that as what to expect rather than as a figure for the whole of it. Ask instead for the two category levels the seller filed the part under; on the same measurement that pair was populated on 98 to 100 positions out of 100, and our note on how a two-level catalogue address works sets out what to do with it.

There is no aircraft model in the record. What do I ask so that the answer is useful?

Do not ask whether the part fits your aircraft — the seller cannot determine that for you, and a yes from them carries no weight at the receiving dock. Ask instead for the part number exactly as it appears on the tag, any alternate or superseding number the seller holds, and which installations they have supplied the unit for. The model field carried a value on 3 of 100 positions on one fresh page we measured and on none of the two others, so its absence tells you nothing about the part itself; the determination sits with whoever installs it, every time, which is where our receiving inspection checklist begins.

What else belongs in the first message when the record itself is thin?

The serial number, and the condition code together with the paperwork that stands behind it. On the fresh page of 100 positions we read on 21 October the serial number was already carried in the listing itself — a measurement on one page of the catalogue rather than a rule for all of it, so ask for it and expect it to be there. For the condition code, ask which document supports it: as removed and serviceable promise different things, and the gap between them is the cost of a shop visit.