Only a few sweeping generalisations on this thread then! To dispel a few myths:
1. There's absolutely nothing wrong with losing sight of your wingman - indeed there are situations where the last you saw of your wingman was on the runway before a stream take-off. There are 2 main methods of staying as a constituted pair - procedural where you take a nominal time separation, say 30 secs from your buddy with perhaps an air-to-air TACAN lock for range; or a radar trail. Normally, if there is scope for a height split then one is taken and 2 separate squawks are allocated. However, in certain circumstances, a height split cannot be given (say in a RVC like the Daventry at FL100)and so the radar trail may be co-alt. Now, in this case, there seems to have been some sort of breakdown in communication and thankfully no-one was hurt and we can all learn from the experience.
2. The perception about required separation minima are, I think you will find, exactly the same for mil and civvies. Perhaps if you were aware of the lengths the military go to to avoid coming into contact with our civilian bretheren unnecessarily, then you could dismount from that particularly tall horse that you've found yourself on.
Ladies and Gentlemen, useless mud slanging gets us nowhere and whilst I agree that the USAF may have been at fault in this particular case, there was a small chain of events that could have been broken by a number of people. For individuals to make sweeping statements and generalise about things they may have little in depth knowledge of is disappointing.
Rather than the "hang the guilty barsteward" mentality, we should be saying "how can we avoid this in the future?" - which I believe is being done by the relevant authorities as we speak.
[This message has been edited by The Scarlet Pimpernel (edited 12 May 2001).]