Living near Teterboro Airport means endless noise and a lower quality of life

When the Federal Aviation Administration ordered new landing patterns to keep business jets away from Hackensack University Medical Center, residents of Hackensack saw little change. This jet headed for Teterboro Airport was one of four or five to pass over southwest Hackensack homes and the Fanny Meyer Hillers School in about 30 minutes on April 18, 2016.

-- HACKENSACK, N.J.

By VICTOR E. SASSON

EDITOR

Day in, day out, the roar overhead is what is driving residents crazy in Hackensack, Teaneck, Englewood and other towns near Teterboro Airport.

Here in Hackensack's Fairmont section, we're even bedeviled by commercial aircraft heading for Newark Liberty International Airport, and seeing a jumbo jet passing over your house at a low altitude will definitely give you the shivers.

Sure, there have been four major crashes of those sleek business jets in the past 32 years or so -- all with fatalities -- but none has hit a house or one of the high-rises on Prospect Avenue.

The Record of Woodland has never taken aircraft noise seriously, and Monday's crash of a Learjet in the parking lot of Carlstadt's public works building is treated cavalierly.

The big banner headline over a Page 1 photo of five or six cars consumed by fire says:

"'LIKE A SCENE FROM A MOVIE'"

Gee. Two crew members were killed, so how about focusing on them with a headline like this?

"TWO PILOTS DIE IN CRASH"

In November 2014, I photographed noisy aircraft passing over South Hackensack on the way to Teterboro Airport. The plane with the propeller on the nose sounds like an enormous banshee, above

Today's paper

Inexplicably, The Record's so-called commuting columnist compares deaths in road crashes to "drug overdoses and other poisonings" (1A).

Not sure why. Maybe other readers can figure that out as they sit in one of North Jersey's infamous traffic jams.

Today's column by Road Worrier John Cichowski is filled with enough numbers to make your eyes glaze over.

When a Cichowski column appears on Page 1, you know Editor Richard Green is desperate. 

And when he starts a column with, "If you think ... road crashes take way too many lives," you can be sure that hardly no one is thinking that, especially if they've seen all of the maniacs on the road these days.