The captain of Malaysia Airlines airplane MH370 planned to migrate to Australia with his wife before the ill-fated flight vanished with 239 people aboard, relatives have revealed.

The Australian reports Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah wanted to retire at age 60 in Geelong, Victoria, where his daughter Aishah was working.

'He [Zaharie] wanted to migrate to Australia. He even asked his daughter to buy a house there and gave her money to do it. The moment he dis­appeared, that plan ended,' the pilot's brother-in-law Asuad Khan Mustafa told the paper.

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MH370 Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah wanted to retire at age 60 in Victoria, according to relatives

Zaharie was captain when the jetliner disappeared in March 2014 while on a flight from the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

Pieces of aircraft wreckage have washed up on beaches in Africa and been positively identified as coming from MH370 but they shed little light on the mystery.

A range of theories have been offered as to why the airplane vanished, including a deliberate murder-suicide plot by one of the pilots, to a hijacking, to a mechanical failure.

In July, investigators found a home flight simulator owned by Zaharie which showed someone had used the device to plot a course to the southern Indian Ocean where the aircraft is believed to have gone missing.

Australia's Joint Agency Coordination Center (JACC), which is overseeing the search for the plane off Australia's west coast, said that evidence of the route did not prove that Zaharie deliberately crashed it.

Zaharie was captain when the jetliner disappeared in March 2014 with 239 people onboard

MH370 vanished while on a flight from the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur to Beijing (stock image)

More than 110,000 square kilometres of seafloor has been searched for the plane, according to JACC.

At a meeting on July 22, Ministers from Malaysia, Australia and China agreed if the aircraft was not found in the current search area, and without credible new evidence, the search would be suspended upon completion of the 120,000 square kilometre search area.

The current search operation has cost Australia $160 million, The Guardian reported last month.

The flight path of the missing plane. More than 110,000 square kilometres of Indian seafloor has been searched for the plane so far