Residents know North Jersey's dizzy web of movement, with busy highways crossing over and under each other through crowded neighborhoods, so well that it continues largely unnoticed.

The mirrored traffic in the skies above still draws a few worried glances upward, though, especially after the plane crash that confirmed the worst fears of a Hasbrouck Heights neighborhood Thursday. The crash killed all four aboard and ignited trees and fences in the back yards just two miles away from Teterboro Airport.

It took Gov. Christine Todd Whitman just hours to arrive at the Washington Place site of the crash, assess the local zeitgeist and say, "this area ... is in a flight path." U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg, Rep. Steve Rothman and state Assemblywoman Rose M. Heck were close behind, calling on state and federal agencies to take a closer look at accidents like Friday's and the crash less than two weeks earlier in a Newark neighborhood.

"It is unfortunate that it takes a tragedy like this one to draw attention to the dangers posed to the community from the airport," Rothman, D-Fair Lawn, wrote in a letter to Port Authority Chairman Lewis M. Eisenberg, whose agency is responsible for Teterboro Airport.

The 185,000 corporate and private planes that flew in and out of Teterboro last year did so in a path hemmed in sideways and vertically by corridors carrying traffic to and from Newark, La Guardia and John F. Kennedy international airports, accounting for the patterns that make ground gazers swear the jets are flying right past each other.

"With the three major airports, plus airports like Teterboro, it's clearly fair to say that the New York-New Jersey airspace is the busiest in the world," said Greg Trevor, a spokesman for the Port Authority.

Federal Aviation Administration data show that the amount of traffic handled by area control towers - which includes planes just passing through their airspace - has steadily increased during the 1990s. The Teterboro tower handled nearly 224,000 flights last year, up from a trough of 181,000 in 1991, while Newark went from 380,000 to 462,000 in that period.

In terms of flights actually landing or taking off, Teterboro has been busier. Its 185,000 operations last year were 35,000 off its peak in the 1980s. It still ranks third in the state behind Newark and Morristown Airport, which draws enough business traffic like Teterboro's to rank it among the 50 busiest control towers in the country, according to the FAA.

While Teterboro's operations are not at an all-time high, Heck, D-Hasbrouck Heights, said there's been a marked change in the type of aircraft flying in.

"When I started doing more in-depth research, I learned that the number didn't rise to any great degree, but the number of large planes did," said Heck, a former Hasbrouck Heights mayor who has been involved in trying to address noise and pollution concerns surrounding Teterboro. "From small planes came these big corporate jets."

Trevor said there has been a mounting count of jets flying into Teterboro, which went from 43,000 in 1998 to 48,000 this year.

"The economy is doing quite well, so more businesses might be using more corporate jets," Trevor said.

Heck concurred, saying wealth is driving Teterboro's success, along with its proximity to New York City.

"It's used as a short hop," she said. "The limousines pick them up here and take them over there."

Heck has called for limits on noise, pollution and traffic at Teterboro, specifically jets. Rothman and Lautenberg asked the National Transportation Safety Board to study the issue, while they also suggested traffic limits.

Only four airports nationwide - La Guardia, Kennedy, Ronald Reagan in Washington, D.C., and Chicago's O'Hare - have limits on how many planes they can accept, and that was accomplished by an act of Congress, said FAA spokeswoman Arlene Salac. Her agency's role is simply to deal with the traffic that exists.

"We do not have any control over the increase or decrease in air traffic," Salac said. "It's usually what the market will bear."

Hasbrouck Heights real estate agent Charles Pantiliano said his market appears to bear the planes just fine.

"I have never had a problem selling a home to people in Hasbrouck Heights because of airplane noise," said Charles Pantiliano, a 15-year broker sales consultant at Gateway Realtors. "Every town around here has this problem. It's not just Hasbrouck Heights."

Angelo Bonura argues that "the people have just about had it," though. He said the smell of fuel in the air outside his Longview Place home was so strong on a recent day that he suspected a plane had dumped it over his neighborhood.