NEW Zealand's Prime Minister, Helen Clark, has opened CTC Aviation Group's latest new training facility - at Hamilton International Airport in New Zealand.

The new centre is designed to deliver initial licence training for airline cadets. It will enable the company, a leading pilot training provider with headquarters in Dibden, near Southampton, to meet growing demand from airlines for graduates of its CTC Wings training programme.

Hamilton is the second new training centre for CTC in nine months. Last summer the company opened a £6m state-of-the-art full flight simulator training facility in Nursling, Southampton.

The CTC Wings programme offers a programme of vertically integrated developmental training for airline pilots.

Wings graduates are now flying with easyJet, Thomas Cook Airline, Monarch Airlines and Britannia, and 80 Wings cadets are currently progressing through their training at CTC's crew training centres in New Zealand and in the UK at Nursling, Dibden and Bournemouth.