Steve Russell was born the son of a Coal Miner at Airthrie Castle Scotland in 1962. The Russell family moved to England in the late 60's and Steve gained his early education in Luton. At 16 Steve left home & took an apprenticeship as an aircraft engineer with Eagle Aircraft Services Ltd at Leavesden near London. At 19 he was the youngest person in the UK to take & pass the CAA Airframe Licence without type rating exam, by the time he was 21 and able to use the Engineers license he had endorsements for Pressurised Metal Airframes, Turbine Engines & a type rating on the ubiquitous Pratt & Whitney PT6.
After the apprenticeship Steve took a degree in Aeronautical Engineering at Hatfield Polytechnic. The degree was a sandwich course, which meant it took 4 years & included a year working in industry. During the degree, Steve spent some useful time learning IT & in particular dBase II (Ashton Tate's original database programming language) with the Department of Trade & Industry in Westminster, and also with McAlpine Aviation at Luton Airport (Now Gulfstream).
After graduating from Hatfield Steve spent a year working as a Licensed Engineer at Plymouth Executive Aviation (PEA) & wrote his first Technical Records database application called KAMS (King Air Maintenance System). In 1987 PEA bought KAMS for £300 and eventually used it to control the Tech Records for a fleet of 50+ Beech King Airs for more than 15 years. In the late 80's Steve partnered with Steve Adams to form the company Russell Adams Ltd (RAL). Though originally intended as a company to do Vehicle/Aerospace Design, RAL immediately became involved in the rapidly developing Aviation/IT world. In the early days, Steve as the sole programmer developed KAMS into AMSP (Aircraft Maintenance Support Program) & from the programming language dBase II into Foxbase, & later into Foxpro. AMSP became known as RAL and was sold all over the world as an aviation maintenance software package that is still in use today.
During the early 2000's Steve took the role as database designer for the new dot.Net C# MSSQL application now called Rusada Enterprise 3. RAL as a company evolved into Rusada and became a global aviation software house marketing Enterprise 3 with blue chip customers such as Singapore Airlines (SIAEC), Eurocopter & Thomas Cook. Rusada eventually moved HQ from Coventry to Switzerland & Steve took a back seat. In 2009 Steve purchased a majority share in Conduce Ltd & is now focusing all his energy in developing the Conduce Group, which has grown from 4 to 20 people in 9 months & now has subsidiary companies carrying out all aspects of IT, Consulting & Web design/software for a wide variety of industry sectors.