does anyone else think that it would be much better to have some way of publishing the places you are physically not allowed to fly?
Not available as such officially, but in the summer a good start is to print off that pink or mauve or whatever AIC which contains all the airshows. These all have TRAs.
For example on 26-28th June there is one at Biggin Hill.
There is apparently a way to detect TRAs from the data stream by looking at one of the headers, and I think this is what some of the 3rd party graphical presentation sites (e.g. dsc.net) used to do.
The curious thing is what happened before the internet? I started flying in 2000 and nobody taught me about notams. The school printed off some local ones on a piece of paper. This is OK for a local burger run but what did pilots do when flying say 500-1000nm?
If IFR (airways) you can get away with it because ATC won't send you through a closed area. You just need to phone the airport(s) to make sure they are open, etc.
If VFR, I suspect people just didn't care.
The internet based system makes is easy to generate all kinds of garbage.
But if one gets the NRB, finding the notams that actually prohibit flight is not hard at all.