A pilot has resigned from Mr Richard Branson's European airline after admitting taking the controls of a plane carrying 122 passengers while unfit to fly.
Virgin Express said yesterday the unnamed Irish-based pilot told them he thought he had recovered from food poisoning but began to feel badly ill again while taxiing the Boeing 737 at Madrid's Barajas Airport before a flight to Brussels early yesterday morning.
A Virgin Express spokesman said the pilot resigned because he felt his failure to call in sick sooner had been responsible for a four-hour delay to the flight. "He accepts he was wrong," the spokesman said, "and that if he had called in sick, the stand-by pilot could have been used and the flight would not have been delayed." The cause of the pilot's illness had not been established.