Jim Goodall is convinced that it was the British who taught the Chinese how to make their famously-complex puzzles.

The Clinton airplane enthusiast has become convinced of this idea during the past 18 months as he has worked to restore one of the most confounding brain teasers Englishmen have ever constructed — a 1959 DeHavilland Comet.

The world’s first commercial jetliner, the Comet is almost an extinct breed. Only 11 examples of the aircraft still exist, and none fly. Goodall’s job for the past year and a half has been to 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, slime mold and algae after being used as a firefighter training facility in the early 1990s.

It was not a promising start when the museum considered the aircraft as a showpiece.

“It looked like the mother creature in “Aliens” was going to drop out of the ceiling,” Goodall said while showing off the aircraft earlier this month.

As if this wasn’t enough, he said the British compulsion complicate the simple makes the restoration seem more like detective work. With more than 500,000 individual Comet components to disassemble, clean, paint, and rebuild, Goodall figures he and crew of more than a dozen volunteer airplane “nuts” will be at it for almost another three years.

He discovered how tough the job would be when he had to disassemble and reassemble the Comet’s center control console half a dozen times to get all the pieces to fit. He said DeHavilland engineers used twice as many parts to do a particular job than almost any other aircraft manufacturer.

“Nobody has anything over DeHavilland on making things more complex than they need to be,” Goodall said.

Three days a week, Goodall takes time off his job as a South Whidbey real estate agent, hops on a ferry, and heads for one of the biggest junk-filled garages in the Puget Sound area. Resembling the spacecraft hangar scenes in “Star Wars,” the Museum of Flight’s restoration facility at Paine Field is Jim’s destination. His job is to turn the building’s biggest piece of junk — that aging Comet — into one of the world’s finest aeronautic museum pieces.

A former electronics salesman, Goodall is the only paid restorer working at the facility. The author of a number of aircraft books and self described as the top civilian authority on the SR-71 Blackbird spyplane, he says his airplane hobby is insatiable.

These days, he’s doing a pretty good job of feeding that appetite. It’s not unusual for Goodall to put in 10 to 12 hour days on the old Comet, working on projects as diverse as hand painting cockpit instrument gauges and trying to separate chemically fused pieces of magnesium, aluminum, copper and steel from one another.

When he started work on the Comet, the aircraft was in sorry shape. The water that filled the 81-passenger plane above the cockpit floor had furthered corrosion started half a century ago by its designers, who used bizarre combinations of metals in the airframe and componentry. At or near Paine Field since it flew in to Everett for an air show during the 1980s, the Comet had only one thing going for it in its long, lonely battle against rot – it was over-engineered.

Born from designs first drawn in 1943, the DeHavilland Comet was an exercise in trial and error. 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. Constructed with square windows and a pressurized cabin — the first that DeHavilland had attempted in a large aircraft — 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. Goodall said the tops of the planes literally blew off.

DeHavilland fixed the problems by adding more metal to the Comet. The Comet Goodall is trying to restore 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.

“Boeing learned what not to do,” Goodall said.

Because of the severity of the water corrosion, the Museum of Flight’s Comet will never fly again. But by the time Goodall and his crew 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, rustproofed, 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. Using sheets of aluminum and a fair degree of innate know-how, Goodall rebuilt the Comet’s disintegrating galley with just a few schematic drawings and the original as a guide.

He said the Boeing engineers who often stop by to see the Comet, ask him how he manages to do work in which he has no formal schooling.

“I’m just a technically competent salesman,” he says.

Upright on its landing gear and parked half inside and half outside the restoration facility, the 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. Goodall said the work might run over budget, but he knows there are enough airplane nuts out there to make sure this plane comes back from the dead.

“You can’t let it die. It’s history.”

When Goodall and his volunteers finish their work, the Comet will be repainted in Mexicana Airline’s 1960s-era Golden Aztec scheme. To get it to the Museum of Flight in south Seattle, the restoration crew will remove the aircraft’s wings, then load it aboard a train bound for the museum. The will reassemble it for the display.

The Comet is expected to make its public debut in late 2004.