This is the story of Air Canada Flight 680, on the 17th of september 1979 an air Canada dc9 was on the ground at Boston getting ready for the flight to yarmouth nova scotia. Cna I just say that air canada liveries peaked with the livery right here, in my opinion the rouge livery comes close but this right here is the best, if someone from air canada is watching please put this livery on a 787 or something. The flight today had 50 people on board with 45 passengers and 5 crew members. The DC 9 lined up and took off at 12:12 pm local time and soon flight 680 was on the climb to get to their cruising altitude of 25,000 feet, As the jet climbed the pilots worked though the checklists, it was mundane but it had to be done and on this day nothing really stood out to the crew as being a cause of concern. Minutes later they reached their cruising altitude of 25000 feet. They were looking forward to a boring cruise and then an explosion rocked the jet as the air was sucked out of the passenger jet at near supersonic velocities, something onboard had just given way. The first officer was flying the plane when the loud bang rocked the plane, while the plane was in autopilot the pilots donned their oxygen masks and carried out communication checks. Looking back the pilots saw that the cockpit door was somehow missing and the blue sky at the back of the plane. This was bad very bad, a huge chunk of their tail had to be missing if they could see straight out of the back of the plane;. The pilots knew that they had to get the jet down to a more breathable altitude fast they said “"Boston Center, Air Canada 680 is doing a rapid emergency descent. Clearance back to Boston, we're out of twenty-three thousand, descending." tower immediately cleared the jet for a right turn and cleared them direct back to boston. As the pilots brought the jet down they let the controllers know that they had just had an explosive decompression and that they would be leveling off at 9000 feet. Then as flight 680 got a sense of what was going on air traffic control got this chilling transmission “"Roger, we are just leveling now and the back end of our tail is blown completely off. If you could have some emergency crews standing by.". The explosive decompression was worse than anyone had anticipated, they needed to get this DC9 on the ground now. As they flew the wounded bird down one of the flight attendants told the pilots that everyone was accounted for and okay except for one flight attendant who sustained a slight impact to her head. Once they had leveled the plane off the first officer went into the cabin to make sure that everyone was okay and to assess the situation. Once the first officer got back into the cockpit the captain told him that the right engine would not go beyond an EPR value of 1.25. But they still had all their hydraulics, if they had lost their hydraulics then it would have been way harder to land this jet. The flight crew wanted the closest runway to them for landing and that was runway 33L at Boston, once the controllers knew that they were headed to runway 33L they sent a small army of emergency services to the runway, ready for anything that might happen. As the pilots lined the jet up with the runway the Boston approach asked the pilots if they had any problems with the controls and thankfully the controls were still responsive, at least for now. They had a tough landing ahead of them they needed to lose speed and altitude but the engines weren't as responsive as usual and since they needed a little bit of margin if something went wrong they decided to come in higher than usual and they decided to use their flaps and landing gear to lose altitude. With that the pilots lined the crippled jet with runway 33L. Then they slowly started to take the plane down, they had no idea what their jet was capable of and everything that they did from this point on might send them straight into the ground. But the jet held together and the pilots brought the plane to a stop on runway 33L their ordeal was over. I looked all over the internet for an image of the damaged DC9 but I wasn't able to find anything, unfortunately. If you have an image of the DC9 send me an email! Or drop it in the comments i’d love to see it.