Quito's old airport had been built when the city was smaller. By 1998 the urban area had grown completely around it, and residents of El Rosario lived with the knowledge that every departing aircraft passed low over their roofs. The dangers were not theoretical. On September 18, 1984, AECA Flight 767-103 overran the opposite end of the same runway after a failed takeoff, killing the four crewmembers and nearly fifty people in the houses it struck. In May 1996 a Brazilian charter carrying the Corinthians football team aborted its takeoff in rain, hit the ILS installation, and came to rest against the airport perimeter - a miracle, since no passengers died. The patterns were visible. The airport stayed.

The aircraft was a Tupolev Tu-154M, serial number 85A720, built at the Kuybyshev Aviation Plant in Soviet Russia and delivered to Cubana in February 1986. By the time of the accident it had logged 9,256 flight hours. Ninety-one people were aboard for the Quito-Guayaquil-Havana routing: fourteen crew under Commander Mario Ramos, with co-pilot Leonardo Diaz and flight engineer Carlos Gonzalez, plus seventy-seven passengers. Most were Ecuadorian, with Argentinians, Italians, Jamaicans, Chileans, and Cubans among them. The names still circulate in Ecuadorian memory. Maita Madrinan Guayasamin, twenty-seven years old, was the granddaughter of the painter Oswaldo Guayasamin. Aboard also were members of the family of Alegria Crespo, later a Minister of Education; her father did not survive.

A pneumatic valve had blocked during the first engine start. The crew worked around it, starting two engines from ground power and the third during taxi, and received takeoff clearance. Then the first attempt failed. The second failed. On the third attempt, at rotation speed, the nose of the aircraft would not come up. The commander called the rejected takeoff. The Tu-154 was already committed. It ran off the end of the runway, crossed the grass overrun, just missed Tufino avenue's traffic, smashed through a wall into El Rosario, clipped an auto shop, plowed through two houses, and came to rest on the soccer field. Families were watching a game. Five children playing on the field were killed when the aircraft ran through them. Then the wreckage exploded.

Survivors later told investigators that some of the doors would not open. People climbed out through a ruptured hole in the fuselage. Some escaped with their clothes on fire and jumped from the aircraft. Witnesses on the ground remembered the cries from inside the hull continuing until a final explosion silenced them. Flames rose up to a hundred and fifty feet. Firefighters poured water on the wreckage to smother the secondary detonations. A mother told reporters her three children were missing. Twenty-six injured people reached hospitals, fifteen of them to Quito Metropolitan. By the following day the Ecuadorian Red Cross had recovered seventy-seven bodies from a crash site that was simultaneously an airliner wreck and a residential neighborhood - a combination that made identification agonizing and grief public.

The immediate response was a massive engineered safety zone at the south end of the runway - a berm 280 meters long and 92 meters wide, completed and inaugurated in mid-July 2000. Tufino avenue was buried beneath it in a two-lane tunnel. The new structure shielded most of the path the Cubana jet had cut. The longer answer came harder. President Jamil Mahuad promised a replacement airport, but Ecuador's economic crisis and his removal in the 2000 coup deferred the project for years. Ground was finally broken in 2006, and the new Mariscal Sucre International opened in February 2013 - about eighteen kilometers east of Quito, beyond the urban fringe, nearly fifteen years after Flight 389. The old runway has since become a city park. Children play there now without looking up.