Once they arrived at the airbase, the scale of the construction project became clear to Wolfe, and he had greatly underestimated what he was up against. Unlike the smaller planes, which would just be repaired with magic if they were damaged, this one required maintenance, which meant the pieces actually needed to be bolted together and not just melded with magic.
Then there were the hundreds of individual rollers, and all the extra bits that went with a hydraulic rear door and control system. The controls were all redundant, both physical and hydraulic, as they were designed by the original engineers, since the witches knew that the pilots wouldn't have the magical power to keep a hundred thousand kilos of airplane in the sky with magic if something broke.
