From The Movie Snob:

Flight of the Phoenix (2004) (C). This remake is a very average action/adventure flick starring Dennis Quaid, Giovanni Ribisi, and Miranda Otto. An oil exploration site in the middle of Mongolia is getting shut down, and Quaid plays the hard-bitten pilot who is sent to ferry the crew and some equipment back to Beijing. (His character reminds me some of Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, now that I think about it.) They run into a sandstorm, and the cargo plane crashes fairly gently in the Gobi Desert, leaving the plane wrecked but almost everyone on board alive. The survivors then have to choose between (1) sitting still, conserving their water, and hoping that someone finds them before the water runs out, and (2) trying to build a working plane out of the wreckage to fly themselves out, at the cost of a lot of toil and a lot of their precious water. Cliches abound, but it’s an okay movie, I guess.