The Anatra Anadis was a single-seat fighter variant of the Anatra Anasal developed in 1916.
It was designed by the chief engineer of the Anatra company in Odessa, a French designer named Elisée Alfred Descamps following an order to build a single-seat fighter variant of the Anatra Anasal (AKA Anatra DS) two-seat reconnaissance airplane. It retained the original Anasal two-bay configuration and the fabric-covered wooden construction. It differed from the Anasal in the lack of the observers' post, in the provision made to install a forward firing machine-gun and it was powered by the 150hp Salmson 9U (Canton-Unné) water cooled, radial engine which was replaced by a not specified Vee-eight water-cooled engine.
The prototype was flown for the first time on 23rd October 1916 and was piloted by the factory test pilot, another French named Jean Robinet. He and Descamps planned to modify the Anadis as a two-seater retaining the forward-firing machine gun and adding an extra fuel tank in order to use the Anadis to scape from Russia in the event of the revolution, that was already foreseeable. However that plan was discovered by the Lt. Kononenko an Imperial Russian Army acceptance pilot attached to Anatra, and those modifications were rolled-back and the development continued as a single-seat fighter.
Testing continued until 11th November 1916 with the official report from the Imperial Army claiming that it was "... no inferior to any German aircraft of the same type (sic) and with greater power.". However, despite the good performance reports, not a single airplane was ordered and the project remained on hold at the Odessa factory until 14th October 1917 when, in the middle of the Bolshevik revolution, piloted by the Staff Cpt. N.A. Makarov, it took-off in a planned flight Odessa-Thessaloniki-Rome-Marseilles-Paris and then, theoretically, back to Russia. That flight it's believed to be the original scape route planned by Descamps himself, so it's suspicious to say the least, that he would have returned to Russia.
In the end the airplane took-off, from Odessa, but the engine failed near Iași , Romania, and was forced to land. It's remarkable to note that this flight, Odessa-Iași, was one of the very first long-distance flights ever with almost 300 km. flown.
Sources:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatra_Anadis
2. Salamander Books - The Complete Book of Fighters
3. http://www.ctrl-c.liu.se/misc/ram/dianatra.html
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