A sleek looking single-place airplane named CEA-311 Anequim, the Portuguese word for great white shark, recently took flight in Divinópolis, Brazil. The airplane looks a lot like a racer but it was designed specifically to break speed records. Anequim was designed and built by professor Paulo Iscold and a team of students at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
The first flight lasted 18 minutes and pilot Gúnar Armin achieved a top speed of 210 knots at 20 inches of manifold pressure, nowhere near full power. That's quite impressive for an airplane powered by a four-cylinder Lycoming engine. The engine has been modified by Sky Dynamics to improve performance.
A post on Anequim's facebook page claims the team wants to achieve the status of fastest four-cylinder airplane. In order to achieve this, the airplane will need to fly faster than 260 knots.
Armin described the handling characteristics of the airplane as similar to the CAE-308, which was also designed by Iscold and his students, achieved no less than four world records in December of 2010, including the fastest speed for an airplane weighing less than 660 lbs. The CEA-308 was clocked at an average speed of 194 knots around a 3-kilometer course.
View the video of the Anequim's first flight here.
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