On 29 August 1998, the aircraft operating the domestic Quito-Guayaquil leg of the flight, a Russian-made Tupolev Tu-154M overran the runway, smashing buildings and crashed into a soccer field in Quito while taking off from the airport.

It was delivered to Cubana de Aviación in February 1986 and by the time of the crash, the airframe had reportedly accumulated 9,256 flight hours.

Madriñan, married to Chilean citizen Alejandro Sule (also spelled "Zule"),[7] was traveling with her 4-year-old daughter Alejandra and her 4-month-old son Martín, both of whom were Guayasamín's great-grandchildren.

[3] Moreover, Madriñan was also the granddaughter of Ecuadorian politician and former government minister Alfredo Vera, who also lost his grand nephew Emilio in the crash.

[8] The family of Alegría Crespo, the future Minister of Education, were on board and her father died in the accident,[9] Flight 389 was preparing for departure.

The crew initiated a rejected take-off procedure, but the aircraft overran the runway, narrowly missed the heavily traveled Tufiño avenue at the end of the airport runway into the middle-class El Rosario residential neighborhood, slammed into a wall, clipped an auto mechanic shop, smashed into two houses and plowed into a soccer field.

Two years before the CU389, and in a similar fashion, on 1 May 1996 an overloaded Fly Linhas Aéreas Boeing 727, which carried the Brazilian Corinthians football team to Portovelo (and also with a stopover at Guayaquil) had also overran runway 35 (start of runway 17) after a rejected take-off in rainy conditions, hit the ILS installation, went down a slope or embankment, hit the airport perimeter wall and came to rest between Tufiño avenue and the airport terrain.

[12][13][14] The plane's mechanical fitness was initially questioned,[3] as at that time Cubana de Aviación was operating within the restrictions and difficulties that Cuba was experiencing in the context of the so-called Special Period that the island was going through after the fall of the Soviet Union.

This period of generalized socioeconomic crisis that followed the end of the Cold War and the termination of Soviet support to the Fidel Castro regime also affected the aeronautical industry and Cubana especially.

In this line, being one of the only remaining operators of Soviet passenger planes in the Western hemisphere at the time, Cubana was known to be having difficulties keeping these aircraft airworthy.

This latter task was especially difficult given a long-standing US commercial embargo and other economic sanctions put in place against the island's Communist regime since the 1960s.

The intense heat of the fire, with flames reaching up to 150 feet into the air, also hampered initial rescue efforts by the locals.

This was mainly the case of Tufiño avenue, which circles the runway 17 start and, due to the safety zone being erected over it, had a two-way tunnel built to allow vehicular traffic under the new structure.

The new airport only began construction in 2006 and was finally opened in February 2013, nearly 15 years after the CU389 tragedy, located about 18 kilometres (11 mi; 9.7 nmi) east of Quito, way outside its urban area.