Unfortunately the movie has not come to home yet so I can’t find a good clip of it in detail (you can see it extremely well in film while parked in one scene) so this quick couple of seconds from the trailer are the best I can do at the moment. You can also see another angle of it from this clip at both the start and end. The movie poster also has the airplane in the top left though it’s very small here’s it on the wiki.
For those unfamiliar with the show the era is about 1960’s East Germany and the show seems to have relatively accurate vehicles. The aircraft in the movie is a twin-engined aircraft where the front of the cockpit seems to be in-line with the engines, looks kind of like a Bristol Beaufighter though the show seems to favor vehicles from the setting so I assume it’s German or Soviet of WW2 vintage (since in the movie it’s said to be a gate guard/display aircraft)
It could be a DeHavilland Mosquito. Or as you say, a Bristol Beaufighter. It’s likely British. It may not be a real plane at all. It could simply look a little like a real one.
It has radial engines and a short stubby nose, so definitely more like a Beaufighter than a Mosquito. There was a Merlin powered Beaufighter version in 1941, when Hercules engines were in short supply, but otherwise Beaufighters had Hercules engines. Mosquitos were all Merlin powered.
Definitely a Beaufighter, the stubby nose, cannon ports in the nose, round oil cooler in the wing and the dihedral on the tail plane are all distinctive.
How historically accurate is the movie? Because a 1940s (British?) plane in the 60s in an East German context would be very improbable, because it would’ve been totally obsolete.
It takes place in a highly fictionalized version of East Germany but some of the vehicle choices seem right according to this
A German U-Boat of WW2 vintage and a P-82 Twin Mustang show up in the shows intro for season 2 of the TV show so it seems they don’t really care about TOTAL accuracy as long as it just looks cool, but you can argue maybe this takes place in a world where the Soviets got a couple of Beaufighters as part of lend lease.
I can totally understand that from an aesthetic POV, as many planes from the forties looked way cooler than the early sixties jet planes, those only got cool designs in the seventies.
Well, it’s a series about a spy, an assassin, a telepath, and a precognitive set in basically the equivalent of the Cold War with a Japanese author so not that much. It’s unclear what the relative differences between West and East are, as least in the anime. That said, it nails that 50s to 60s look of technology.
It looks like both flat and V tailplanes were installed on the Beaufighter. The picture on the Wikipedia article has a flat plane, but various other pictures show a dihedral (as shown on the anime). So it might be possible to narrow it down further to a specific version.
It seems to have 4 machine guns in the wing, 2 each side, instead of the 4 starboard, 2 port arrangement of earlier marks. That, plus a suggestive bulge in the nose ahead of the cockpit, makes it a Beaufighter Mk.21, or inspired from that version.
