We consider the L 2 well-posedness of third order Benjamin-Ono equation. We show that by means of a normal form and a gauge transformation, the equation can be changed into an Airy-type equation. A second goal of this work is to establish that the solutions to the nonlinear third order Benjamin-Ono equation problem exhibit a dispersive decay estimate analogue to the corresponding linear associated problem. The key ingredient is the use of a nonlinear vector field akin to the work in [7,8].