Imagine you are 30,000 feet in the air, jetting your way across the Atlantic. You are spending the flight contemplating your future — career, marriage, children. Suddenly, two engines fail and smoke fills the cabin.

The prospects immediately before you quickly crowd out the future.

So too is it with those who gathered a week ago Wednesday to begin the master planning for the Pike. Appointed by both the Mayor and Turnpike Chair James Kerasiotes, the group first met to begin what was supposed to be an extended discussion of air-rights development. The evening was spent in a rather dry discussion that ranged from the history of the Turnpike to the complexities of constructing platforms over the roadway. The group's ostensible goal was to design a comprehensive strategy for building over the Boston segment of the Pike.

The whole thing was a bit surreal, because staring the group in the face was an imminent proposal to develop a mega-project on the most prominent Turnpike parcels — those in the Back Bay and Fenway. Indeed, the newspapers the next day carried stories planted by the Turnpike that sketched out that project. Last Tuesday, those stories were confirmed when Millennium Partners spent the day in an extended show-'n'-tell, pushing its dream of building Boston's third tallest building.

What's the master planning group to do? It is in the embarrassing predicament of looking irrelevant. One presumes, probably correctly, that no citizen-led group would sign off on a 59-story tower over the Pike. Indeed, the group quite clearly would have insisted upon architecture and design that was in the context of the neighborhood in which a project was being built. It almost certainly would have concluded that state and local government should work with developers to make it economically feasible to create appropriately scaled buildings. Millennium's proposal fit none of these criteria.

Worse still, the master planning group risks being ignored. The sense of crisis that the Millennium proposal has generated threatens to capture everyone's attention, and rightfully so. Like the disabled jet airliner, the events of the present moment overwhelm any effort at long-term planning.

In theory, a specific proposal such as the one made by Millennium triggers a different review process, one led by a Citizens' Advisory Committee (or, as bureaucrats love to term it, a CAC). Thus, the project-specific CAC will be meeting at the same time as the broad-based master planning group. That simply doesn't make sense.

What to do? At a minimum the CAC and the master planning committee should refuse to play in the little cubbyholes to which they have been assigned. The CAC can't evaluate a specific project without some reference to broad master planning. Nor can the master planning group do its work without being cognizant of specific development proposals now on the table.

The two groups need to coordinate; indeed, perhaps they should simply merge and become one. They should proceed deliberately and thoughtfully, and not let themselves be pushed around by one specific project.

A generation has passed since the Boston extension of the Turnpike was built. Spending a few more months, or even a year or so, is the right thing to do.