About the Book
New York to Paris is the extraordinary true story of one man’s decades-long quest to fly an ultralight aircraft across the Atlantic and the profound spiritual awakening that transformed a dream of flight into a journey of the soul.
1980: At 28, Eagle Sarmont took off from Long Island in a motorized hang glider, determined to follow Lindbergh’s path to Paris. Flying around the Statue of Liberty and up the Hudson River through New York and into Canada, his journey ended abruptly when Canadian officials stopped him near Baie-Comeau. The dream, however, refused to die.
The 1980s: While building a second aircraft with greater range, Eagle worked as an aerospace engineer, contributing to fighter programs and inventing revolutionary spaceflight concepts. But when his wife was diagnosed with cancer, everything changed. The second attempt never launched—and after 30 years of marriage, she passed away, leaving him drowning in grief and rage.
The 2000s: In a single ultralight, with no plan and no destination, Eagle took to the skies again—not to conquer anything, but to find himself. What began as aimless wandering became a coast-to-coast odyssey across America, then a transatlantic crossing to Iceland, Denmark, and finally Paris. Along the way, he discovered something far more profound than he’d ever imagined.
This book defies category. Yes, it’s filled with breathtaking flight sequences, skimming 20 feet over Monument Valley at dawn, threading through cloud mountains over the Great Plains, flying low over the rivers of Iceland. But between those flights are conversations with his late wife from “the other side,” encounters with the Creator, and hard-won lessons about forgiveness, unconditional love, and what it truly means to become more than who we are.
Eagle writes with the precision of an engineer and the raw honesty of someone who has stared into the abyss and chosen light. He doesn’t shy away from his darkest moments; the rage that nearly consumed him, the plans for revenge he abandoned, the spiritual experiences that challenged everything he thought he knew about life and death.
“Because times change. I have changed. And because maybe someone needs to hear that it’s possible to go from rage to peace, from grief to joy, from feeling small to discovering you’re part of something infinite.”
New York to Paris is for anyone who has ever:
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Officially labeled fiction “for legal purposes,” the book opens with Eagle’s direct challenge to readers: “It is up to you to choose what you wish to believe about it. After all, what is true when two people can share an experience and one person enjoys it and the other does not?”
He acknowledges the impossibility of proving spiritual experiences, yet writes with such specificity and conviction that readers are left to grapple with their own definitions of truth. The result is a book that works equally well whether you read it as memoir, spiritual testimony, or philosophical exploration.
“This isn’t just a flying story—it’s a story about what it means to be human, to lose everything, and to find yourself again in the most unexpected places.”
“Eagle writes with the precision of an engineer and the soul of a poet. His technical descriptions of flight are mesmerizing, but it’s his spiritual honesty that makes this book unforgettable.”
“I picked this up thinking it was an aviation adventure. It turned into one of the most profound books I’ve ever read about grief, forgiveness, and personal transformation.”
