B737-900
Flight Crew Air Transport Pilot (ATP)
Workload; Distraction; Situational Awareness
Deviation - Altitude Crossing Restriction Not Met; Deviation / Discrepancy - Procedural Clearance; Inflight Event / Encounter Wake Vortex Encounter
General None Reported / Taken
Environment - Non Weather Related; Human Factors
[We were] assigned the SHEAD 8 RNAV departure. All briefings done at the gate and the airplane was set up to fly the SID per the SID climb in LNAV/VNAV. I actually had the center map with the altitude profile dialed up as it looked like it worked well in the recurrent training video. It doesn't work so well if you have 7;000 set in the altitude window. As we pulled up number one for [Runway] 25R; [a B737] was cleared for takeoff ahead of us. We were asked if we had [him] in sight. We said yes. We were told to keep [him] in sight; cleared for takeoff. As I pulled onto the runway and ran the power up; I was surprised at how close we actually were to [him]. He was just rotating when we had takeoff power set. My bad on that one; anyway; we took off and were close so we were paying a lot of attention to him. I went into VNAV and put on autopilot 1 so as to allow the airplane to comply with SID restrictions as they were confirmed in the FMS. At about 2;000 AGL we got into [his] wake turbulence. I disengaged the autopilot and swung a little wide on the turn at RBELL to stay out of his way. Evidently; he was not speeding up as in VNAV; we accelerated to 250 K. To preclude closing on him; we did mistake number two. The First Officer went to level change/230 on the MCP. I said go back to VNAV and speed intervention at 230. He did that. We leveled off at 7;000 for the ROPPR restriction. Here comes the problem. We were level at 7;000 and the altitude was set at 7;000 and we were in altitude hold. We were also still distracted by [the B737] as we were maybe 2 miles behind him. We started our climb out of 7;000 late for MDDOG and wound up abeam MDDOG at 8;800 as we continued the climb to 11;000. Rest of the departure was uneventful. We discussed what happened climbing out of 240 and agreed that a huge mistake was made by not setting FL190 in the altitude and flying the departure in VNAV. Actually reverted to the old school thing of setting the next altitude and when we were distracted by [the B737]; we (I) was late on the climb. Had [the B737] not been a factor; I believe we would have caught the MCP error sooner and this would not have been an event as we were definitely eating him up on the departure. Cause: Trying to follow [the B737] VFR under IFR rules/separation. [We] needed to deviate from NAV path due to wake turbulence. That caused me to not monitor to progress of the MCP and the SID as closely as I should have.
B737-900 flight crew reported they were unable to make a charted crossing restriction on the LAS SHEAD8 RNAV departure when they were distracted by wake vortex encounter from the preceding B737.