🫡🫡Several Factors Affect Climb Performance For propeller-driven aircraft, climb performance is directly dependent upon your plane's ability to produce excess power. For the purposes of this article, excess power means any reserve power your engine has above what's required to maintain level flight. Excess power can also mean converting kinetic energy (airspeed) into potential energy (altitude), but we'll save that for another article. Excess power is affected by weight, altitude, and aircraft