Connie Leatheart was among the first twenty British women to hold a pilot's licence. Short and amply proportioned, she was educated at Cheltenham Ladies college, and learned to fly with the Newcastle Aero Club in 1925. Despite landing upside-down on her first solo flight, she gained her pilot's licence in 1927. A year later she acquired the first aircraft of her own. Later she had three more - a Sopwith Grasshopper, a Westland Widgeon and a Comper Swift.
At the outbreak of World war II, Connie was with the map section of the original British Airways in Bristol and offered to stay in her job. Consequently she missed being included in the first eight women assessed for the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) in 1940. This was the civilian organisation responsible for more than 300,000 ferry flights from the manufacturers to RAF and Royal Navy bases at home and overseas during World War II However, with 700 flying hours in her log-book, Connie joined in August of that year. Now in her late thirties, she had been flying for fifteen years and had flown 16 aircraft types. She had toured Europe extensively and had jointly owned a company that bought and rebuilt crashed aircraft. Connie delivered many Spitfires from Eastleigh, but never occupied a senior position in the ATA, preferring the cockpit to the office. Her common sense and equable nature made her a valuable, if occasionally blunt, friend and adviser.
In later years, Connie lived unobtrusively in her farmhouse at Capheaton, never talking about her wartime escapades. Her final instructions were that her funeral should be a simple Christian ceremony with no address, followed by burial in an unmarked grave with no headstone. It was only when her self-penned death notice appeared in the local papers that people knew of her passing.