I'm glad I've not renewed my offshore training, helicopters were by far the worst part of that job, get dressed in a rubber suit, with a bulky lifejacket and escape set and sit in that for up to two hours sweating your arse off becasue you are wearing 3-layers under it in the winter.
My thoughts on helicopters are also coloured by being on G-REDL the day before it crashed killing 16 people coming back from the Miller platform. Apparently they had already found anomalies in the gearbox, e-mailed Eurocopter adn carried on flying until they got an answer. My dad was on an RAF Puma coming back from the continent. He did an inspection when they landed at Manston and found that one of the blades was about 20 mins from failure. In response he designed a blade-wear indicator (didn't get the patent rights of course).
In terms of stuff round here recently, I think I saw the same Apache activity as above (or similar), two in close proximity over the house. We've also had the usual KC135, Osprey, F-15 action, and yesterday what I think was an RAF C17 (I think I saw roundels)