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Battle of the X-Planes
2003 · Film · documentary · 116 min
Directed by Michael Jorgensen
From 1996 to 2001, Boeing and Lockheed Martin produced rival designs and prototypes for the Joint Strike Fighter, a stealthy, affordable combat plane intended for the 21st century needs of the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marines. In "Battle of the X-Planes," NOVA goes behind the scenes to show the world's newest fighter taking shape, as Boeing and Lockheed Martin compete to win the largest contract in military history.
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If you haven't I'd highly recommend watching Battle of the X-Planes.
A documentary by NOVA about the JSF competition between Lockheed Martin X-35 (which became F-35) and Boeing X-32. Official PBS link [0].
Here is the official site [1] with full transcript and behind the scenes about the making of the documentary (quite insightful).
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kNszWU7hTw
[1]: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/xplanes/
It wasn't so crystal clear then. I'm assuming the documentary you saw was Nova's "Battle of the X Planes". Recall that a Navy requirements change made Boeing's design overweight, so it never performed any STOVL operations in its full flight configuration. Lockheed Martin had an aircraft with enough margin to do a short takeoff, supersonic dash, and then land vertically, all in the same trim. So the DoD had to choose between Lockheed, which had a plane that had already shown it could fulfill the mission, and Boeing, which proposed to build an aircraft significantly different than it had tested and hadn't had a single flight that demonstrated all capabilities like LA had.
Proven versus unproven. That's the choice that was present.