First, a quick clerical patch: 0001, attached, fixes the placement of a comment which got shuffled around in the lead-up to publishing the changes for South Sudan in 2021a. Patch 0003 relates to Tonga, and comes from some of the links P Chan shared to 1957–1963 editions of The Air Almanac: https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2021-February/029866.html On Thu, 25 Feb 2021 at 03:43, P Chan <legco@outlook.com> wrote:
1960 Nov (1962.1-4) https://books.google.com/books?id=bVgtWM6kPZUC&pg=SL1-PA20 1961 Mar (1962.5-8) https://books.google.com/books?id=W2nItAul4g0C&pg=SL1-PA20
When looking around at how this data was presented for other regions, I noticed on the preceding pages (listing "Places Fast on GMT", i.e., east of Greenwich) in some of the earlier editions provided that Tonga was listed at GMT+12:20. The peculiar offset stuck out, and I quickly noticed that some of the later editions of the same tables had it at GMT+13. A quick bisection puts the changeover, as far as The Air Almanac contemporaneously reckoned it, between November 1960 and March 1961. Previously, our data had Tonga transitioning to UT+13 in 1941 based on a quotation from a 1997 news article. Although this differs from what the Almanac suggests by some 20 years, the article does mention a change coincident with the New Year, and that Tāufaʻāhau Tupou IV was Crown Prince at the time. As his predecessor and mother, Queen Sālote Tupou III, reigned from 1918-04-05 to 1965-12-16, a possible transition of 1961-01-01 still jives with the gist of the article, even if the specific year was perhaps wrong or just misprinted. For what it's worth, our commentary already noted that Shanks & Pottenger had put the transition even later, at 1968-10-01. Although of course we don't know how they arrived at that date, given that they did, 1961 seems rather less out-of-place than it otherwise might. The attached patch 0003 makes this adjustment, while more fully documenting and comparing the conflicting sources. Thanks again to P Chan for pointing us to these resources. I wasn't expecting to get a "bonus" correction out of it, but one never knows quite what will catch the eye… -- Tim Parenti