After the final communication from the plane (a simple acknowledgement of "Romeo November Delta, Malaysian one seven"), a few minutes later flight controllers in Dnipro and Rostov talk on the phone trying to locate the flight.

"Do you observe the Malaysian," Dnipro asks.

"No, it seems that its target started falling apart," Rostov responds.

"It's not responding for our calls too," Dnipro says. "It's disappeared."

Moments earlier, the report finds, a large number of high-energy objects smashed through flight MH17, causing it to break up in mid-air and crash in eastern Ukraine.

There was no distress message and no sign of any technical fault or pilot error, according to the Dutch Safety Board.

This impact caused the plane to break up in mid-air, according to the Dutch Safety Board.

All 298 people on board MH17 died in the crash, including 27Australian citizens.

"Multiple holes and indentations" were found in wreckage from the cockpit and forward section of the plane.

A part of the cockpit roof also showed holes indicating the plane was penetrated from the outside.

"Material around the holes was deformed in a manner consistent with being punctured by high-energy objects [which] originated from outside the fuselage.

"The pattern of damage observed in the forward fuselage and cockpit section of the aircraft was consistent with the damage that would be expected from a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated the aircraft from outside."

The aircraft broke up in the air, with some parts continuing down and forward before breaking up further.

The black box recording from the cockpit ended abruptly with no sign of alarm, the report found.

"No aural warnings or alerts of aircraft system malfunctions were heard on the cockpit voice recording, which ended at 13.20:03 hrs," the report said. "Crew communication gave no indication that there was anything abnormal with the flight."

The engines were running normally at cruise power until the data recording stopped.

According to the report, MH17's flight plan was approved by all the usual air-traffic control centres.

The plane changed course over Ukraine to avoid thunderstorms.

The Dutch Safety Board is taking the lead in the investigation, assisted by experts from Australia, Britain, Germany, Malaysia, the US, Ukraine and Russia.

The investigation covers the cause of the crash, the decision-making around flight routes and the availability of passenger lists.

Experts looked at photographs from the crash site, satellite images and the data recorders (black boxes). The flight recorder was slightly damaged in the crash but the memory module was intact, all 30 minutes of data were recovered and there was no evidence it had been tampered with.

The investigation was hampered because the flight came down in separatists' territory in eastern Ukraine, close to areas of heavy fighting.

Investigators were only able to make a few short visits to the crash site in late July, to take photographs of the wreckage.

The safety board's investigation into MH17 will continue "unabated" after the preliminary report, the Dutch Safety Board said.

The investigation may also include a return to the crash site.

On Monday Malaysia's Defence Minister Hishamuddin Hussein said he had agreed "in principle" with Ukraine that an international team of personnel from Australia, the Netherlands and Malaysia "should gain early safe access into the MH17 crash site".

However Mr Hussein said he had received a briefing from the chief of Ukraine's army that the crash side is "currently volatile and inaccessible".

The Dutch Safety Board said the information in the preliminary report was "tentative" and could change with further evidence.

The board's final report is expected within a year.

Crash investigators are unlikely to identify the source of the "high-energy objects" that downed the plane.

However on Monday the BBC's Panorama program quoted eyewitnesses saying they saw Russians operating a BUK missile launcher in the area where MH17 was shot down.

BUK missiles are designed to explode near their target, sending shrapnel shredding through it.

The pro-Russian separatists in the area have denied they possessed a BUK, and denied shooting down MH17.

"I can say only one thing: we simply do not have the military hardware capable of shooting down a Boeing passenger jet such as the Malaysian plane," Alexander Zakharchenko, prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, told Russia's Interfax news agency on Tuesday.

"It is obvious that it was an act of provocation carried out through the armed forces of Ukraine to discredit Russia and the people's militia," Miroslav Rudenko, another senior rebel commander, told Interfax.

However the BBC reported that photographs and videos cast doubt on this claim.

One eyewitness saw the missile-launcher being deployed from a truck at Snezhnoye, close to the crash site, just hours before MH17 came down.

The eyewitness told the BBC that the crew were "well-disciplined, unlike the rebels, and not wearing the standard Ukrainian camouflage uniform sported by government and rebel troops alike".

Russia is unlikely to accept the report if it suggests they were involved in shooting down the plane.

A recent editorial in Pravda said "Most likely the story of the downed plane will be hidden away carefully … it is clear that neither the [separatist] militia nor Russia were involved in the terrible disaster.

"The only question is whether Ukraine incidentally shot down the Boeing or it was a carefully planned but ineptly executed act of provocation."

The established narrative in Russian state-controlled media is that the plane was shot at by Ukrainian forces, either by a jet fighter or ground-based missile.

A separate criminal investigation into who may bear responsibility for the crash is being conducted by prosecutors in The Hague.

The Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, welcomed the findings.

"The ICAO's preliminary findings make clear that the tragic downing of MH17 was not due to aircraft malfunction or pilot error," Mr Abbott said in a statement.

"Instead it was penetrated by a large number of high-energy objects from outside the aircraft, leading to an in-flight break up.The findings are consistent with the government's statement that MH17 was shot down by a large surface-to-air missile," he said.

"The international community must remain focused on finding, prosecuting and punishing the perpetrators of this cowardly attack. We owe this to the innocent victims of the MH17 downing and their families," Mr Abbott said.