An aviation expert has claimed that the ill-fated MH17 flew a route 482 kilometre north of the usual path from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.

According to a report by The Telegraph , Robert Mark, a commercial pilot, said most MAS planes flying between the two destinations normally travelled along a route significantly further south than the plane which crashed.

"I can only tell you as a commercial pilot myself that if we had been routed that way, with what's been going on in the Ukraine and the Russian border over the last few weeks and months, I would never have accepted that route.

"I went into the FlightAware system, which we all use these days to see where airplanes started and where they tracked, and I looked back at the last two weeks' worth of MH17 flights, which was this one.

"And the flight today tracked very, very much further north into the Ukraine than the other previous flights did... there were MH17 versions that were 300 miles south of where this one was," he was quoted as saying.

Mark is also an editor of the Aviation International News Safety magazine.

The Telegraph noted that records of recent MH17 flights on the FlightAware appear to lend credence to the expert’s claim.

However, Malaysiakini ’s checks on the same data on FlightAware and Flightradar24 found that Flight MH17 flew across Ukraine all 14 times over the past two weeks, and each time passing in the vicinity of the city of Donetsk.

The largest deviation from the July 17 flight path while in Ukrainian air space for MH17 took place on July 13, by about 200 kilometres, but this was at the western part of the country that is largely unscathed from the separatist conflict.

Again, the July 13 flight also flew near the rebel-controlled Donetsk when it reached the strife-torn eastern Ukraine.

Both FlightAware and Flightradar24 derive its flight data from the same source, which are public radio broadcasts that includes GPS location and other flight data from the aircraft itself, called Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B).

These are then detected by radio receivers in the vicinity and relayed to the websites in live time.

However, meteorologist and CNN ’s weather expert Chad Myers speculated that Flight MH17 could have altered its flight path in order to avoid certain weather.

Minister: It was a designated safe route

This evening, Transport Minister Liow Tiong Laid said the plane, with 298 passengers and crew on board, was travelling along a route designated as safe by aviation authorities.

He also dismissed claims that MAS had chose this route to save on fuel cost, pointing out that other airlines also flew along the same route as well.

Meanwhile, The Telegraph also quoted a former head of group security at the BAA airports, Norman Shanks as stating: "Malaysia Airlines, like a number of other carriers, has been continuing to use it because it is a shorter route, which means less fuel and therefore less money."

Aviation safety authorities in America and Europe had warned pilots as early as in April about potential risks flying in or near Ukraine airspace.

However, the route taken by MH17 was not included in the US Federal Aviation Administration and UK’s Civil Aviation Authority’s notices.

In the past week alone two Ukrainian military aircraft were shot down and a third was damaged by a missile in the area where MH17 crashed.