ATC did not yet grasp the severity of the situation. In aviation, the word "lost" as Captain Fuchs used it generally means a loss of engine capacity. ATC therefore believed that two engines had merely stopped functioning, and did not know that they had broken off the wing. It is probable that the crew, too, did not know that the engines had fallen off the aircraft. The outboard engine on the wing of a 747 is visible from the cockpit only with some difficulty, and the inboard engine on the wing is not visible at all. Given the choices that the captain and crew made following the loss of engine power, the Dutch parliamentary inquiry commission that later studied the crash assumed that the crew did not know that both engines had broken away from the right wing.