On Sept. 1, 1930, a red Breguet 19 Super Bidon biplane took off from Le Bourget, Paris’ then-main airport, and landed in aviation history 37 hours and 12 minutes later at New York’s Curtiss Field. Unlike Charles Lindbergh, who flew nonstop east from New York to Le Bourget in 1927, the pilots Dieudonné Costes and Maurice Bellonte powered through the prevailing headwinds over the Atlantic and completed the more difficult westbound leg between the two cities for the first time.

A lot has changed in nine decades. Le Bourget’s grand art deco terminal is now France’s National Air and Space Museum where exhibits include the Super Bidon as well the retired supersonic Concorde, which would 50 years later shrink that same New York-to-Paris journey to a mere 3.5 hours.

But Le Bourget, as well as that trans-Atlantic route, still make headlines. Every two years, the airfield hosts the Paris Air Show in conjunction with the Farnborough Airshow, the largest industry event in the world. The show ended on Sunday and this year, one of the shows’ main draws was a superefficient single-aisle Airbus A321neo jet, which can fly from the French capital to Newark, New Jersey, just a short ride from Manhattan, on a single tank of fuel. In the past, such jets typically flew shorter routes spanning countries and continents. But the new Airbus plane is powered by ultra-efficient LEAP jet engines developed by CFM International, a 50-50 joint venture between GE and Safran Aircraft Engines, which provide double-digit gains in fuel efficiency and allow the plane to fly further while also lowering carbon emissions, oxides of nitrogen emissions and noise.