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When you’ve played your last game, the cheering subsides and the fanfare fades — then what? Jim Ritcher pondered that question after 16 seasons in the National Football League, then launched a second career as an airline pilot, fulfilling a boyhood dream.

“I always wanted to fly,” says Ritcher, who as a child attended air shows with his father in Ohio.

These days, Ritcher travels each week from Raleigh to Charlotte, climbing into the cockpit of a Boeing 777-200 American Airlines jet transporting as many as 273 passengers to international destinations like Rome, Milan, Munich,