Romeo — NATO Phonetic Alphabet for R

Romeo does more than spell the letter R. As a military time-zone letter, it marks UTC−5 — the zones running west of Zulu (UTC) are lettered N through Y, and R is the reference for U.S. Eastern Time in military and aviation contexts, so "1400 Romeo" is shorthand for 2:00 p.m. Eastern, the same way "1400 Zulu" marks the same instant in Coordinated Universal Time.

ICAO's official pronunciation documentation is straightforward here — "ROW-me-oh," the same stress pattern most English speakers already use naturally, unlike some of its alphabet neighbors.

Put concretely: a flight scheduled to depart New York at 9 a.m. local time would be filed with a controller as departing at 1400 Zulu, and a military unit on the U.S. East Coast working entirely in its own local reference would instead call that same moment 0900 Romeo — two different letters describing the identical instant, depending on which reference the speaker is using.