When I look at an aeronautical chart, there are many D, R and P areas. As a sim fligher, I never cared about them, but nevertheless I am curious. Take e.g. the area south of Plymouth (UK). There are 5 Danger Areas in a chain, together they form a bigger area. They are marked as D9M, D8M, DM, D3M and D4M.South of Portsmouth there are D30M, D38M, D39M, D40M and D37M.Is the last part (after the D) an identifier or does it tell us something about the kind of danger you can expect there? If they are only identifiers, how to know about the danger?Same thing of course for Restricted Areas. How to know which restrictions?http://httpd.chello.nl/~j-kusters/logo.gif(When my sig doesn't show, my provider has some trouble with moving the menbers pages to another server) [link:Ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Tradewind/"]Visit TCA TradeWind ]Jozef[/font

If it were the USA, you would find out by calling either the flight service station (1-800-WX BRIEF) or the ATC in charge of that airspace. I don't know about the UK. Regarding Danger areas, I don't believe we have those here in the US. Instead, we have prohibited, restricted, and military operations areas. The first area you won't be getting into, period. The restricted area you probably wouldn't get into, and the MOAs are all over the place. You can go into them, just give a call to ATC and then watch your surroundings.There are a lot more areas as well, but regardless, you would want to call the ATC agency responsible for controlling those areas to find out if/when you could enter the area. They normally (in the US) put the ATC for that area somewhere along the edge of the chart.

Hi Jozef,The designation of the area tells the pilot what the area is and where it is. Eg for D009A on my charts(UK 1:500 000), just south of Plymouth around the Eddystone Rock:D = Danger area0 = Between 50 deg and 51 deg latitude09A = a numerical designator, as there may be many other areas between 50 and 51 deg (eg D008, D013 etc).At the foot of the chart should be a list of danger areas with the corresponding ATC and frequencies that would give one of the 2 services:DACS = Danger Area Crossing Service (Via Plymouth Mil or London Mil in the above example)DAAIS = Danger Area Activity Info ServiceYou can either get the service in-flight or by contacting the appropriate control before flight. Obviously, there is no service for a P (prohibited) area.The many D areas south of Plymouth are there as a result of the weekly Naval exercises on Thursdays.Restricted areas are also listed at the foot of the chart, and usually only apply under certain conditions.Hope this helps,Neil