The Boeing 727-259 Advanced that became Flight 301 had already lived several lives before it reached Bolivia. Manufactured in 1980 with serial number 22475 and powered by three Pratt & Whitney JT8D-17R engines, the aircraft was delivered first to Avianca in Colombia on December 4, 1980, registered as N204AV. It passed to Capitol Air Express in December 1993, then to Sun Country Airlines in October 1994 under registration N289SC. Lloyd Aéreo Boliviano, once Bolivia's flag carrier, took delivery on December 28, 2002, registering it as CP-2429. By 2006, the plane needed maintenance so extensive that it spent nearly a year at Jorge Chávez International Airport in Lima. It returned to service on June 4, 2007, just as the airline itself was struggling to resume operations after being grounded since March 2007 over financial and safety concerns.

Flight 301 was not a routine commercial service. Bolivia's military transport arm, Transporte Aéreo Militar, had chartered the LAB aircraft to carry stranded passengers as part of a solidarity program addressing route closures across the country. The flight departed El Alto International Airport in La Paz, bound for Captain Aníbal Arab Airport in Cobija, a remote city in Bolivia's Pando Department near the Brazilian border. When the pilots attempted to land at Cobija, bad weather forced them to abort — not once, but several times. With the airport officially closed, the crew diverted southeast to Trinidad, roughly 500 kilometers away. The detour consumed fuel that had been calculated for a different route, and the weather over Trinidad was no better. Somewhere over the green flatlands of Beni, the tanks went dry.

What happened next could have been catastrophe. Instead, it became something closer to a miracle. Captain Lobo Gómez, drawing on nearly three decades of experience, guided the powerless 727 toward the flattest terrain he could find near Trinidad Airport. The aircraft touched down in a swampy area a few kilometers short of the runway. There was no fire. Damage to the airframe was minimal. Soldiers from the nearby Reynaldo Zeballos Sergeants School, who happened to be conducting training exercises in the area, witnessed the impact and rushed to help. They evacuated passengers and retrieved luggage while emergency teams, firefighters, and ambulances arrived from Trinidad. Of the 156 people aboard, only two suffered minor bruises and were taken to the hospital as a precaution. The rest walked away from the aircraft uninjured.

Bolivia's Directorate General of Civil Aeronautics led the investigation into the incident. The findings were straightforward and damning: fuel exhaustion. The aircraft had carried approximately two hours of fuel for the flight, but regulations required an additional 45 minutes of reserve — a margin that would have been enough to cover the diversions and weather delays. LAB had violated its own internal regulations by departing without adequate reserves. The CEO of AASANA, Bolivia's aviation services authority, confirmed the shortfall. For LAB, already teetering on the edge of viability after years of financial trouble and regulatory disputes, the incident underscored the systemic problems that plagued Bolivia's former flag carrier. Captain Lobo Gómez, however, was celebrated as a hero. His skill in landing a fuel-starved tri-jet in a swamp without losing a single life earned him recognition across Bolivian media as a pride of the nation's aeronautics.