Oak Harbor resident Ken Bates is taking a trip back in time on a Comet — a 1959 De Havilland Comet, to be precise.

As a British citizen, Bates helped design one of the early versions of the Comet, which was the world’s first commercial jetliner. Now, he’s involved in restoring one of the last of an almost extinct breed.

Only 11 examples of the aircraft still exist, and none fly. Bates’ volunteer job for the past year and a half has been to help restore perhaps the most poorly cared for of these survivors for the Seattle Museum of Flight. That survivor is a former Mexicana Airlines plane that spent nine years half filled with water, slimy mold and algae after being used as a firefighter training facility in the early 1990s.

Another islander working on the project, Clinton resident Jim Goodall, recalled his first look at the old Comet. “It looked like the mother creature in ‘Aliens’ was going to drop out of the ceiling,” Goodall said.

But thanks to efforts by Bates, Goodall and other history buffs, a new Comet is taking shape.

Born from designs first drawn in 1943, the De Havilland Comet was an exercise in creativity, trial and error. “It was before computers and pocket calculators,” Bates said. “It was all done by longhand and a slide rule.”

Though the Comet’s first flight in 1952 left Boeing in the British company’s jet-powered dust for almost nine years, the Comet had some deadly flaws. Two early Comets exploded over Rome after a couple years of flying time. Flown higher than even today’s jetliners, the early Comets succumbed to the stresses caused by low air pressure at high altitudes. According to Goodall, the tops of the planes literally blew off.

Shortly after those tragedies, young Ken Bates joined the design team. Born in Bedford, England in 1930, he attended the DeHavilland Aeronautical Technical School from 1946-51. He served in the Royal Air Force from 1952-55, then began his career as a design engineer on the Comet Mark IV, the successor to the earlier, ill-fated Comets.

“Morale was still pretty low, but as time went by it improved,” Bates recalled of the post-crash atmosphere at De Havilland. He said both doomed planes were fished out of the Mediterranean, “and put back together in England.” The company set about bolstering the strength of the plane, but also shared the information learned from the disasters with competitors. Boeing, for example, was working on a jet airliner. Working for Boeing later in his career, Bates said he found those De Havilland reports in a Boeing library in Wichita, Kansas. “They learned by De Havilland’s mistakes,” he said.

De Havilland fixed the problems by adding more metal to the Comet. The Comet that Bates and Goodall are restoring is one of those extra-beefy versions. However, by the time that plane took wing, the Comet nameplate was tarnished and Boeing was outselling the pioneering jet with its 707.

Because of the severity of the water corrosion, the Museum of Flight’s Comet will never fly again. But by the time the volunteers finish with what is this hemisphere’s only example of the plane, it will be a prime museum piece.

To get it ready to become part of the museum’s planned indoor commercial plane display, the restoration team is removing almost every component the public will not see. Wiring, hydraulic equipment and other machinery that will only continue to corrode gets chucked. What remains is being pulled apart, cleaned, rust-proofed, painted and rebuilt.

Other components will be replaced. On a loft inside the restoration facility, 81 Comet seats removed from other old airframes wait to be installed. Other bits and pieces for which there are no original substitutes must be recreated.

Bates has a particular connection to the plane, which was the first Mark IV built. “I was on the design team,” he said. He actually flew in the prototype. “They would take you up as ballast if your name was on the list,” he laughed. The pilot was one of England’s greatest air heroes in the Battle of Britain, John “Catseyes” Cunningham.

Today, the partially restored Comet looks pretty good from the ground. A new paint job applied by Boeing a few years ago as a paint test gives the old bird a cared-for look. But inside its fuselage, the Comet is gutted and empty. It’s hard to visualize it as a craft that once carried people in a cabin that was roomy by today’s standards and probably more comfortable.

To bring it back to its former glory for the museum-going public, various donors have given $280,000 to the restoration project, but more will likely be needed.

When the volunteers finish their work, the Comet will be repainted in Mexicana Airline’s 1960s-era Golden Aztec scheme. The Comet is expected to make its public debut in late 2004 at the Museum of Flight in Seattle.

Bates retired from Boeing in 1992 after 30 years of involvement with a number of historic projects. But nothing matches the Comet for the history of jet flight.

Working to restore the Comet seems right to Bates at this time in his life.

“I’ve gone full circle,” he said.