Bombing Encylopedia

"The Bombing Encyclopaedia (BE), later renamed the Basic Encyclopaedia, was a comprehensive U.S. Air Force catalogue of potential bombing targets developed during the Cold War. Each target was assigned a unique eight-digit BE number, typically formatted as four numbers separated by hyphens."

According to the CIA Reading room FOI files the first four digits which are in the format "0616" refer to the World Aeronautical Chart (WAC) where the target is located.  I would expect to find values with the following ranges:

0737

0738

0739

0615

0616

0617

The SEADB and CATC files have a field POSTB which when reading the detail from the 1970 description document indicates that a strike mission would use characters 1-12 for the BE number and all other characters (1-15) would be used for Recce Mission details.  This means that it is possible to extract the BE number from the cell with a bit of excel.

The POSTD field, in the 1967 set, has, what appear to be, free text descriptions which map to the BE detail for some target classes

BE values in the series 0615, 0616 and 0617 all appear in the record set for 1967 at least

Understanding the CATC records

 The data was grouped into sets

Control Set - (Mission Identification)

Sequence of mission

HQ

Target

 Sortie

Unit ID

Fixed Set  - (Mission Function)     

Classification

Nickname

Target Information

Coordinate of target

Terrain

Weather

Cloud cover

Periodic Set 1 - (Enemy Defences)

Position

Number

Response Time

Type of Fire

Periodic Set 2 - (Missile Data)

Tactical Unit

Missile position

Maneuver time

Visibility

Periodic Set 3 - (Load data)

Delivery Information

Periodic Set 4 - (Results data)

Measure of result

Periodic Set 5 - (Air Incident)

Friendly or enemy

Loss

Damage

Abort

Diversion

Time

Tactics

Period Set 6 - (Comments)

Comments

Record Structure V1

 This is my current analysis of the decode table.  It is WIP and a new one will be uploaded once I move to the 1966 record set.  I have discovered that cl_4203 only contains 3 records each of 1 character and assume that the clock position record is erroneous.

Downtown Scenario - Hang on Snoopy (Pt 2)

     Carrying on from Part 1

Chris Hobson's book mention a second strike later in the day.  Going back through the CATC set for October/November there is an Iron Hand Mission being flown out of Danang.  This is a USMC EF-10