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On a sunny morning last week, Steve Kent sneaked into New Jersey in a seaplane. This required some planning, since his Cessna is very loud and not particularly sneaky. Taking off from a little airport in Warwick, N.Y., Kent popped over the treetops of Bellvale Mountain, descended into a deep glacial valley and dipped his plane's pontoons into Greenwood Lake, a skinny body of water that wears the state line between New York and New Jersey like a belt on its hips.
Landing a few hundred feet short of the line, just inside New York State, Kent taxied into Passaic County at 26 knots.
"We call this 'skip taxiing,' " he said. "It's just like skipping a rock across the water."
Kent executed this complicated (and entirely legal) maneuver because on most lakes and rivers in New Jersey, seaplanes are allowed to operate only as boats. They may float on the water, but they may not take off or land. Due partly to that quirk in state law, and factors including an aging pilot population and the rising cost of seaplane ownership, Bergen County has changed from a national hub for seaplanes to a virtual no-go zone in just one generation.
"They were very active here. It was common to see a seaplane in the sky," said Steve Riethof, vice president of the Aviation Hall of Fame of New Jersey, next to Teterboro Airport. "In this area it's become a rarity."
In the decade after World War II, the Hackensack and Passaic rivers were home to 50 seaplanes stationed at six different bases, according to H.V. Pat Reilly, author of "From the Balloon to the Moon," a 1992 book about New Jersey's aviation history.
The decline of North Jersey's seaplane culture reflects shrinking interest nationwide in general aviation involving small private planes, local pilots say. There are now 174,883 active airplane pilots with private flying certificates in the United States, a 7 percent drop from 2012, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
Steve Hedges, spokesman for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, said much of that decline can be attributed to the aging out of pilots who were trained during World War II and the Korean War.
Modern seaplane pilots face economic hurdles. For instance,...