I remember the absolute chaos in the WOC at Wattisham when during one exercise Neatishead frantically called for Q to scramble but gave no scramble instruction. When pressed for more info they said that CAP position was to be overhead Manston.
Stn Cdr refused to launch Q as he was convinced Neat were getting exercise inject confused with real life and they weren't helping matters by getting loud and emotional on telebrief. Matters got even worse when the next info we got from Neatishead was that an unknown aircraft was travelling at high speed across Europe and that's why we needed a CAP over SE England. Still the Staish refused to let us launch Q until he'd spoken to 11Gp. Every phone in the building was ringing, I answered the direct line from either 56/74, can't remember who was on Q, and had the duty auth asking would they be allowed to paint a red star on the jet if they shot it down
I can't remember now if we got round to launching a jet or not or indeed what caused the flap in the first place.