There are 190 C17As in service; the aircraft is propelled by four turbofan engines (of the same type used on the twin-engine Boeing 757) and can drop 102 paratroopers at once.

The aircraft employs an adjustable, chin-mounted air intake that supplies air to the single Lyulka-Saturn AL-31FN afterburning turbofan jet engine.

An artificial neural network based expert system has been developed and is applied to aircraft turbofan engine fault diagnosis.