Family of missing Malaysian Airlines Captain Zaharie Shah from flight MH370 pay tribute to him. Courtesy: Chumguan Phoon/YouTube

Family of missing Malaysian Airlines Captain Zaharie Shah from flight MH370 pay tribute to him. Courtesy: Chumguan Phoon/YouTube

INVESTIGATORS believe someone in the cockpit of MH370 might have plotted at least four potential flight paths — and three of them lead to Australia.

Flight routes ending in Port Hedland, Adelaide and Perth could have been programmed into the Flight Management System (FMS) of the Malaysia Airlines flight which went missing on March 8 after taking off from Kuala Lumpur.

Cocos Island — 2750km north-west of Perth — is a fourth possible programmed end point, according to a new report into the plane’s disappearance.

After yesterday announcing that the hunt for MH370 would shift further south, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau released a comprehensive 64-page report outlining the basis on which this new search area had been defined.

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While the report makes assumptions about pilot control inputs, these are for the sole purpose of defining a search area rather than identifying responsibility for the plane’s disappearance.

Despite this, the report provides the most thorough detail about what might have happened to MH370 and the 239 souls aboard the ill-fated flight.

Authorities believe MH370 turned left before entering Vietnamese air space and tracked along the Malacca Strait before making a southern turn at the north-west tip of Sumatra, Indonesia.

The report identified southern air routes that MH370 may have intersected or traversed after deviating from its flight-planned route to Beijing.

“Air routes and waypoints were then examined to see if there was any correlation with the possible southern tracks for MH370 obtained from the analysis of the SATCOM (Satellite Communications) data,” it said.

“Relevant southern air routes that MH370 may have intersected/traversed were N509, N640, L894 and M641.

“Waypoints associated with these air routes were also considered as possible points on the MH370 flight path.”

The report then lists those flight routes, which conclude in Port Hedland, Adelaide, Perth and Cocos Island — but said there was insufficient evidence to determine whether MH370 intersected any of these waypoints.

Airports at Port Hedland, Adelaide and Perth could all accommodate the landing of a Boeing 777.

The runway on Cocos Island is the shortest — at just 2440m x 45m — but a Boeing 777 could “easily” land there, an another aviation source confirmed.

The ATBS report, released on Thursday, suggested that autopilot was activated by someone in the cockpit but that this human intervention was followed by mechanical failure which would have caused all aboard the jetliner to lose consciousness.

Investigators said the “best fit” scenario was a “hypoxia event”.

“Given these observations, the final stages of the unresponsive crew/ hypoxia event type appeared to best fit the available evidence for the final period of MH370’s flight when it was heading in a generally southerly direction,” the report said.

“By the time of the final SATCOM log on message, the autopilot could have been disengaged for approximately 3 minutes and 40 seconds and the aircraft would have been descending during that period.”

Investigators believe MH370 then spiralled into the ocean.