They were surplus aircraft. You could buy them real cheap at the time. Although there are only a few left now they were available in the 50's and 60's.
The airplane has large engines and a narrow body. It would never make any service other than used as a bomber in wartime...
BUT hauling goldfish is the same as hauling water. As the live goldfish are in plastic bags filled with water and these bags are inside cardboard boxes. So having an aircraft that was intended to haul heavy bombs in a narrow space was ideal for hauling goldfish/water. We could fill every available space with the small heavy cardboard boxes
and the 25 would still fly! Those huge engines would do whatever was asked of them.
As the fuel load went away the plane would get light enough to land. When we lost the engine in San Juan, on take off, we had a full load of both fish and fuel... On our way back to Miami, We went around on one engine and landed with the full load with no problems.
<img src="/forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> It was the right engine that went away. So the aircraft naturaly turned to the right...which is out of the pattern.. The San Juan tower seeing the smoke and the prop feathered came on and said "89 Whisky permission to turn right granted" We were so busy we never answered, but later we had a good laugh at it. Because we had no choice of going to the left! The plane even climbed on that one engine. But always to the right.
My memory tells me we had the left engine pulling 40 inches (I may be wrong on this) And we both had our feet on the rudder pedal pushing with all our might to just get her kinda straight. But I am still here and the fish made it by other carrier to miami.
Big JIm <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/pfft.gif" alt="" />