Similar Engineering- Feat movies?

Apollo 13 comes to mind, though I can't remember how much of the actual details about the engineering that they go into. Mostly, I remember the scene where the NASA employee shows the team of engineers all the components that they stranded astronauts would have to work with, and for them to create a solution with that.

I asked myself the same question, and here's the best I could come up with in the way of epic stories of engineering and human resourcefulness- Dambusters, Das Boot, Bridge on the River Kwai, Road Warrior (seriously!)
In all these stories characters are forced into desperate situations in which they must improvise with the scant materials they have to create something original and brilliant. In all these scenarios, the solution is ingenious, but at the same time has a childlike simplicity to it, just like Dorfmann's basic premise of rearranging the limbs of the aircraft, like a giant lego model. In all this scenarios the solution is also visually spectacular, which is why the stories lend themselves so well to film treatment.
However, Flight of the Phoenix is and always will be the greatest story of this kind for me. I've just watched it for the first time in about 15 years, and it had me in tears.

"First Men In the Moon" (lunar landing in the mid 19th century)

Isn't there some film about people trying to lug a Spanish Galleon over a mountain range for some reason? A mammoth undertaking, even with the ship dissasembled.

More loosely there's Sahara, involving a search for an ironclad battleship in the desert. There are a few examples of ingenious improvisation in that one.

i seem to remember a movie where a flying boat is turned into a sailboat.
can't remember much more than the image of the bird with a mast and sail.
maybe someone else can?

I did not save the boy, God did. I only CARRIED him.

Not exactly the same sort of movie since it's a comedy, but I really enjoy Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. Watch the special features on the DVD. They actually reconstructed many historic airplanes, tho making them safer than the originals. I always thought it would be fun to build things like those.

Just finished watching Phoenix, am about to put in Murphy's War, with Peter O'Toole. Perfect example.

Well, how about The Dam Busters?

This is a true story of how the RAF was able to bomb the dams of the Ruhr valley, that would flood one of Germany's main industrial regions. They used a special bomb that would skip across the water. Though some things were changed to keep certain secrets secret, this was a rather ingenious, if rather unusual, means of precision aerial bombing for a day and age when "precise" meant the bomb landed withing 200 yards of the target.