But Mr Mark said: „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.“