A Canadian Air Force CH-149 Cormorant and two U.S. Coast Guard MH-60T Jayhawks on March 3 rescued more than two dozen fishermen from a sinking ship 130 miles south of Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Lt. Craig Campbell was piloting one of those Jayhawks on what would be his first major rescue mission. He tells "Rotor Radio" what it was like hovering at 90 feet in 55-knot winds while hoisting survivors from a bucking ship, without power or headway, taking 30-foot seas beam-on. 

When wildfires are at their worst, as they have been in recent years, there are few more potent weapons than the giant orange dragonfly that is the Erickson S-64 Air Crane.

Erickson bought the manufacturing rights to the S-64 Sky Crane from Sikorsky in 1992, changed the name to Air Crane and has been building, operating and improving the 70-foot-long (21 meter) bus-faced heavy lift helicopter ever since.

S-64 pilot and training captain Keith Gill joins Rotor Radio to discuss the unique helicopter’s firefighting superpowers. Flying for Oregon-based Erickson, Gill has followed the fire season around the globe from Australia to Greece to the western U.S. most years for the better part of four decades.

Washington, D.C., is covered by some of the most restricted airspace in the world, but that doesn't prevent dozens of government agencies, the military, police, hospitals and other operators from flying helicopters over the U.S. capital. 

On any given morning, D.C.-area residents running, biking or walking their dogs along the Potomac River are treated to (or tormented by, depending on one's point of view) to helicopters flying the route into and out of the city.

On the 10th episode of Rotor Radio, Andrew Logan, founder of the Twitter handle @HelicoptersofDC, joins us to discuss all that chopper traffic and the data-gathering game he's developed to keep track of it all. He's now got more than 8,600 rotorcraft-rapt followers. 

Dozens of D.C.-area residents, many of them stuck gazing out of their home windows for months on end, regularly participate in "copterspotting." They spot Air Force UH-1s, Department of Energy Bell 412s, Presidential VH-3Ds and other models. Using their phones, they snap photos or take video, then upload to Twitter using the hashtag #copterspotter and the helicopter emoji, then tag a geographical location. 

It's a game, citizen journalism and a crowd-sourced data gathering effort all in one. Logan has plans to plug the data into an algorithm that could eventually ID helicopter models automatically, but for now it's all good fun.