Ms. Flynn, the mother of three daughters, with no college degree  “I had ‘life experience,’ ” she said with a smile  applied at American Eurocopter as soon as she heard it planned to open its original facility, a plant making civilian rescue helicopters, at the nearby Golden Triangle Airport.

She landed an office job, and after four years worked her way to supervisor in the materials department. Known to her co-workers as “Miss Judy,” she is easy to spot by her bright blue lanyard, bearing her company identification card and lapel pins with pictures of American Eurocopter aircraft.

Still, for her, as for many American Eurocopter employees, the adjustment wasn’t so easy. In the company’s first year, turnover was rampant as workers struggled to adjust to the painstaking routine of assembling helicopters. Inside the factory, the time-consuming work was as challenging as a skilled trades position in a car plant, demanding precision, attention to detail and a reasonable understanding of helicopter mechanics. It was a departure from the routine of a typical factory.

The dropout rate was high, “mainly driven by the fact of people not knowing very well what we were doing,” said Marc Paganini, the chief executive of American Eurocopter. Executives soon realized that something had to be done to protect their new investment. Most of the original workers had left, taking what little experience they had with them, and newcomers were making all kinds of mistakes, which were costly given that the helicopters being assembled were used for rescue missions, where lives were quite literally at stake.

But instead of giving up on their workers and replacing them with more-experienced counterparts from overseas, managers decided to spend more time interviewing and assessing American workers, and to provide more training once they were on the plant floor.

Ms. Flynn said the attitude at the plant became, “We will help you to succeed; we are determined you will succeed here.” Soon, the turnover slowed, and a second plant opened next door.

The factories gave EADS the opening it wanted in the American market, letting it compete for an even bigger prize: a $35 billion contract to build refueling tanker planes for the Air Force, which it landed in February 2008 in a stiff competition with Boeing.