Paris has already had to withdraw a fleet of electric buses after a couple of fires, while in Venice-Mestre last October 21 people died after an electric bus caught fire and plunged off a flyover.

The “race to net zero”, as the politicians like to describe it, isn’t just expensive; it is dangerous.

It isn’t only electric buses which burst into flames, of course – Ken Livingstone’s infamous bendy buses also had a habit of catching fire, and they were diesel-powered. But when electric vehicles catch fire they can be a lot harder to put out due to “thermal runaway” where one overheating cell leads to the neighbouring cell, setting off a chain reaction.

With buses, the problem is even bigger than in cars because the batteries are necessarily larger.

The fires can’t be tackled in the same way as petrol or diesel vehicle fires, and vehicles are in some cases being left to burn themselves out.

I am sure these problems may eventually be overcome and electric vehicles become a lot safer than they are now, but it isn’t going to be easy or quick. A couple of years ago I took a speculative punt on a start-up company which seemed initially to have solved the problem of thermal runaway in vehicle batteries. You only have to look at my miserable, shrunken investment now to tell that the technology isn’t coming along quite as hoped.

I have been a lot more wary of green technologies since then.

But the problem is that the demands of our 2050 net zero target don’t give anyone the time or space to sort out these sorts of problems properly. The zero emission vehicle mandate introduced by the government on 1 January demands that 22 percent of all cars sold in Britain this year are pure electric, rising to 80 percent by 2030.

The plans for the green transition are more than a little half-baked (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say somewhat over-baked in the case of electric buses).

Transport for London, like everyone else, is being forced to invest heavily in technologies today despite the point that they will likely improve vastly in the near future.

Khan has promised to make all buses in London zero emission by 2037.

But how is he going to get there when it looks as if he may well have to withdraw an entire fleet of 380 buses?

If he doesn’t take these buses out of service, I fear he may find himself short of passengers willing to take the risk.

Khan is a great one for ramping up public fear when it comes to air pollution.

As I was the only Tasmanian in the squadron, one Sunday the CO – Squadron Leader John Ryland – said, “Let’s go for a burn to the west coast.” It was a beautiful day and we flew around the coast at low level to Port Davey and Bathurst Harbour, exploring all the waterways at about six metres before flying back over the mountains and Hobart to Cambridge. We were in the air for about two and a half hours. At that time the Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mary, both converted to troop carriers, were in Hobart, and when the Queen Elizabeth left at 4 a.m. we did an anti-submarine patrol for her lasting four and a half hours.

Over the next few days we flew half a dozen long patrol flights without any significant sightings. On December 17th we flew for six and a half hours giving air cover for a landing at Dili by 270 men from the Tasmanian 2/40 battalion and 500 Dutch native troops, as the Portugese settlement was considered to be unable to defend itself. We arrived back at Koepang with all tanks showing empty.

Soon after arriving at Koepang I developed the symptoms of malaria with a high temperature, but managed to continue flying. In between the flying programme we went into the town such it was; very primitive with few shops and no hotels. We got to like the Dutch beer which was plentiful, and had no option but to like the water buffalo, black and tough, served with boiled buffalo grass (similar to a coarse spinach), interspersed with meals of rock-hard biscuits and bully beef.

The main objection I developed to air force life was the fact that all the flying days commenced with breakfast at 2-3 am, so that we could take off at first light, often when one had a hangover. I vowed that when and if I returned to civvies I would not have an alarm clock in the house and would never get up early!

After the usual early take-off on December 14th, and a patrol right around Timor, we were back in Darwin doing patrols almost to New Guinea. Then we were back to Koepang again. On Christmas Day we had a Christmas Dinner of sorts in Darwin and later, tea in Koepang.

During the rest of December we spent days digging ‘fox holes’ or trenches and flying more patrols. I noted that I had lost a stone in weight since Laverton, due no doubt to the climate and food. Boarding an uninsulated plane standing in the sun the inside temperature would be over 60 degrees, and you could fry an egg on the wing. We would fly in nothing but shorts and the sweat would run down our bodies in rivers to make the shorts sopping wet. After take-off and climbing up to 4000m everything froze. We would often take beer up to cool it down.

It was a period of devastating losses of aircraft and aircrew for 2 and 13 Squadrons. Most of the enemy action losses were at Ambon, while Koepang had more than its share of accidents. On January 20th I was detailed to go to Ambon with three relief crews and had packed all my gear, but was replaced at the last moment by the CO by a more senior WAG.

At the time my job was to sit at the top of a 30m radio tower with an Aldis lamp to send and receive messages to and from an American cruiser one kilometre away in the harbour. After unpacking my kit I went back to the tower which was only 100 metres from the airstrip. I watched aircraft A16-79 take off with Flight Lieutenant Cumming as captain. It was obviously tail-heavy, as it became airborne on three wheels and went straight up to about 70m. Halfway up I heard the pilot put the throttles ‘through the gate’, and the engines screamed. The plane flicked over and crashed vertically at the end of the strip almost at my feet. No one could get near the burning plane because of all the exploding bullets ricocheting everywhere, and with a full load of petrol on board all that was left was a pile of 12 charred bodies. The thought that I was nearly on that plane gave me a mighty uncomfortable feeling, and I became a great believer in the power of fate. Then in February Flying Officer Mitchell, with whom I flew often, struck a hill when coming in to land on one engine at Penfui in a heavy rain storm with very poor visibility. All the crew were killed.

At that stage, out of the four 9 Course Wireless Air Gunners who had been posted to No. 2 squadron, I was the only survivor. I was either lucky or had a guardian angel. On February 6 we were on patrol for six hours to the Celebes, north of Timor, and we later learnt that we had just missed running into a flight of 24 Zeros and 18 bombers. On another occasion I was down to go to Ambon again when another WAG, Jack Maudsley, jumped the queue in front of me. He was killed three days later.

Earlier in January we were landing at Darwin after a flight from Koepang at night when we hit 44 gallon drums on the strip, put there to prevent enemy landings. The duty pilot was very drunk and not capable of guiding us in to land.

In the meantime I enjoyed the three weeks living it up in Melbourne. As I was having trouble with a sore eye, I reported sick and they fished out a piece of steel that had been there since the Darwin raid. I passed out while they were digging for it. On April 9th I disobeyed orders and hopped on the Nairana for Launceston, where I had a few days re-uniting with family and friends. Everyone remarked on how thin and how yellow I was, due to the anti-malarial tablets we had to consume.

In Melbourne I saw a lot of John Smith who had lost an eye flying in Singapore. He wore a big black patch to cover the gory mess where his eye had been, and when passers-by in the street made rude remarks about the patch he would horrify them by lifting the patch. Later when he was fitted with a glass eye he would pop it out into his beer as a party trick. In 1943 he married Helen Pickersgill, the nurse who had looked after him at Heidelberg Hospital.

By May 17th the RAAF became tired of granting me leave as my pilot was still on sick leave, and they posted me to Parkes, where for six weeks I did a crash course on navigation together with 30 other wireless air gunners. Phil Corney, of Richmond Tas, who later made an escape from captivity in Java, was on the course with me, as well as another good friend Frank Edgerton-Warburton from WA.

We took it in turns to work four or seven days on and four or seven days off. Our office was right beside the ANA air terminal, so we would scrounge all the left-over chicken dinners from the domestic DC2s arriving from Melbourne. Being on duty all night, as was the girl on the telephone exchange at Evandale, I often had three-hourly conversations with her, but we never met personally.

We both gained our commissions on 28 December, 1942, back dated to October 1st, so from Flight-Sergeants we became Pilot Officers, and moved up to the officers’ mess. Our pay was the equivalent of $1.75 a day, plus 30c deferred pay, less 25c income tax.

For the seven month period there was one long holiday, with parties, fishing at St Helens, swimming, climbing Cradle Mountain and more. I usually borrowed or rented a car, but petrol on strict rationing was always a problem. Every morning flight mechanics had to drain a cupful of aviation petrol from all the training and commercial aircraft to check for water. By following them around with a gallon tin I scrounged plenty, and mixed with a bit of unrationed kerosene it made good car fuel.

By February 23rd ’43 the long party was over, and we were posted to No.4 Operational Training Unit at Williamtown near Newcastle for an eight week course of navigation, radio and gunnery in preparation for a posting to a Vultee Vengeance dive bombing squadron.

After just 12 hours flying Wirraways we were judged fit to upgrade to the Vultee. Most of the flying was done in low level formation a few centimetres above the water of the many lakes in the area. The leader of the formation of four or five Wirraways would fly about 300 mm lower than the others and would try to roughen the water with his propeller. Another favourite trick was to fly along the beach in the trough of the waves and jump over the breaking surf. There were many casualties. The air to ground gunnery was also hazardous and exciting.

In April we had our first Vultee flight. They were quite a unique two-seater aircraft. The RAAF ordered 342 of them from the US where they had been designed to be better than the successful German Stuka dive bombers. They are the only plane ever to be designed to fly straight down. Because of this the wing was parallel with the fuselage; hence they flew tail down like a crab. The single engine was a 1600 horsepower Wright Cyclone 14 cylinder radial, driving a three-bladed propeller. Their maximum speed was 450 kph, maximum height 7,000 m, with a range of up to 5,000 km.

The Vultee’s armoury was four forward-firing .5 machine guns in the wings and twin .5 machine guns for the rear gunner/navigator/radio operator to use. The bomb load was one ton, and they had basic dual controls in the rear cockpit for emergency use.

The big advantage of diving vertically was that the pilot could corkscrew the plane around to get the target on line. To prevent the aircraft from exceeding the speed of sound on the way down, it had dive brakes on the wings like latticework, which would give it a terminal velocity of just over 800 kph. Sometimes the pilot would retract the dive brakes too soon, and the speed would increase to the point where servicing flaps and other bits would blow off.

An obvious problem was that as the aircraft did a vertical dive, the bombs wouldn’t come out of the bomb bay, and if they did they could fall into the propeller. To fix this, the bombs were thrown clear by pivoting arms.

You might be poorer, more depressed, and more likely to end up drafted for a foreign war than you were when he hobbled into the White House three years ago last Saturday, but you’ve finally made it to the year you get to vote him out, if you’re smart enough.

In January 2022, we brought you “A Scandal For Every Month: The Biggest Botches, Failures, And Mess-Ups Of Joe Biden’s First 12 Months In Office.”

Last January, there was another year of disasters to catalog. If you’re like me, you’re probably losing track of all the scandals and which ones happened when.

On May 2nd I was told that 50 Jap Zeros attacked Darwin, shooting down 16 Spitfires from 452 Squadron for the loss of three Zeros. My first patrol was on May 6th watching over a six ship convoy off Melville Island for over four hours, flying with P/O Jack Killalea, a rooky pilot just out of training school. We did several more patrols and two flights searching for a lost Beaufighter around Daly River.

I seemed to spend a lot of time swinging compasses, playing bridge and partying. Here I should explain that the swinging the compass of an aircraft consisted of towing the aircraft away from buildings etc and turning the aircraft to the four compass points to calibrate the reading to compensate for the magnetic influences of the metal in the aircraft.

Several aircraft and pilots were lost at that time:
• On May 13th a Hudson piloted by Pilot Officer Venn dropped his load of bombs on a 3,000 ton ship in Ambon harbour at very low level. The ship exploded, but so did the Hudson. No survivors.
• On May 21st a B25 crashed when taking off, and next day one Vultee did not return from a flight of 15 off Darwin.
• Phil Corney could not be found on May 30th when his plane was due to go off on a job, and I was about to fill in for him when he turned up. I watched them crash on take off. They were OK, but the Vultee was a write-off and the pilot Hank Morgan was sent south for further training.

June was spent flying around Darwin practising dive-bombing and gunnery. That month I applied to ‘remuster’ as a pilot as I did not like flying behind inexperienced pilots in whom I had little faith and no confidence. Again my application met with no success.

On June 18th 12 Vultees took off from Batchelor, landed at Bathurst Island to refuel, and dive-bombed an airstrip under construction on the island of Selaru south of Tanimbar. It was the first Vultee action in the war. All returned and all bombs hit the target. For some unknown reason they were ordered not to fire their guns.

I could never understand why Vultees were not used more in action, as their bombing accuracy was unbelievable. When bombing a ship they could almost lob a bomb down the funnel, and could spray the ship’s anti-aircraft gunners with the four .5 front guns during the dive.

In May RAAF Command in Melbourne decided that 12 Squadron should go to Merauke, the last Dutch outpost in New Guinea. For some crazy reason, possibly my seniority, I was put in charge of a working party of 64 ground staff to go there by ship together with another 200 advance party.

At Darwin, in between air raids, we had to load 32 truckloads of supplies and 17 trucks of men and baggage onto an 8,000 ton US Liberty ship Charles P. Steinartz , built only three months earlier. With 500 on board we departed Darwin on June 29th for Thursday Island escorted by two corvettes, with a Beaufighter and a Hudson for air cover. We slept on stretchers in the hold and were fed from army cookers on the deck. We organised a few concerts and played cards to fill in time.

On July 2nd we anchored off Thursday Island, and after unloading supplies into tenders until 4pm my group clambered down cargo nets into motor boats and motored the five km to Horn Island. Due to a mess-up there were no tents or supplies there, so at 8 pm we commandeered a crash launch and went back to Thursday Island where we slept in the Padre’s recreation tent (not with the Padre).

Next day we returned to Horn Island and set up a reasonable camp. Three days later we returned to Thursday Island to board a little coastal passenger steamer bound for Merauke. My first class cabin was very comfortable and the first class dining room likewise. The let down was that there was no food but bully beef and biscuits which we had to have for breakfast, lunch and dinner. To break the monotony I conned the cook into allowing me to convert the bully beef and biscuits into a pie, which was a vast improvement.

The Land of Mud and Mosquitoes

On July 4th we sighted land and promptly ran onto a sand bar. We got off at high tide and sailed into the Merauke River to unload the tons of supplies, all in heavy rain. Merauke has often been described as the arsehole of the world. Before the war it was a Dutch penal settlement. It was all flat, swampy, always raining and only two metres above high tide level, while the mosquitoes were the biggest in the world and in infinite numbers. In addition, big green frogs, scorpions and snakes were everywhere.

The RAAF station was all tents, which had to have split coconut palm logs for floors to avoid the soggy ground. For the next few weeks, with my group, I worked on making roads and building a camp for the whole squadron to occupy. Conditions were horrific as it rained every day. The mud was bottomless, so that some of the roads had to be corduroyed with split coconut palm logs, while the landing strip was special steel sheeting. We also constructed miles of foot tracks over the sodden ground using split coconut palm logs set up on round cross logs.

I had at my disposal an Indian motor cycle and side car, an old Triumph motor cycle and a 30 hundredweight Chev truck, which had such a lovely gear box that you could change gears without the clutch. At 22 years of age I became a fast learner on road and bridge construction. The 60 men had four 6-wheel drive trucks plus loading equipment and worked well.

Within a few weeks I had a comfortable two bed tent and a garden with lettuces, cucumbers, tomatoes and coconut palms. I also adopted a skinny native dog I named ‘Clockwork’, which travelled everywhere with me, either on the roof of the truck or on the motor bikes.

The officers’ mess gradually grew into shape and the food improved. There was a limited supply of grog which we would occasionally supplement with proof spirit from the hospital. The toilets were pit types, on a mound of earth two metres high, to be above the water table. One day I was doing my ‘job’ and peacefully reading the toilet paper – a two-year old women’s magazine – when there was a loud crack as the rotten superstructure collapsed and I fell with it into the hole.

The squadron of 12 Vultees arrived in October ’43, as the camp was ready, and remained there until July ’44. There was also an American Kittyhawk squadron based on the Merauke strip, so the Japs only tried a few ineffectual air raids. There were the usual crash casualties due to bad weather and bad flying by both the Vultees and the Kittyhawks.

While the squadron had been waiting for the Merauke camp to be ready the planes were based at Cooktown, where they did a lot of convoy patrol work. On July 4th A27-217 crash-landed on the beach at Port Douglas, and on August 4th A27-235 crashed on Ruby Reef, 45 miles east of Cooktown. The crew, including a Tasmanian friend Dennis Holmes, was rescued by a Catalina from Cairns.

In September I was appointed squadron photographic officer, which gave me endless opportunities to take photos and do my own developing and enlarging. A few weeks later I was also appointed acting squadron signals officer.

By this time we had an outdoor picture theatre showing regular screenings, and when not there I played bridge – lots of bridge – with the squadron medical officer ‘Doc’ Merrington and other air crew.

During the nine months I was at Merauke I flew 20 sorties, mainly on patrol plus one trip to Horn Island for grog. Apart from a few dive-bombing practices, they were fairly uneventful except for one occasion flying with Squadron Leader Guthrie, the CO, when he practised his shooting by diving at white caps on the waves and forgot to pull up. I’ll swear we flew through the spray of our own bullets.

My 23rd birthday was spent on patrol over the Arafura Sea. The only way we could top up our grog supply was to send a Vultee to Cooktown or Cairns for stocks. It was quite a work of art to load the bomb bay with cartons and shut the doors, then catch the cartons when the bomb doors were later opened. We got 70 dozen on October 28th and 64 dozen on January 1st – very important events.

On Christmas Day it is an air force custom for the officers to wait on the airmen. With grog supplies plentiful that day it was a long party. Someone detonated some dynamite, someone else let off smoke bombs in the mess, someone pinched all the Padre’s port and someone crashed the CO’s car into a tree. I was thrown down the well (our drinking water supply) because they caught me lacing the dwindling beer supply with medical alcohol while serving behind the bar.