I have no idea what the current guy is doing, but I can tell you for a FACT that Willie Walsh was (and probably still is) very cognizant of what is discussed on these forums, and it was not fed to him by elves. There are many others, and I have even witnessed at an event (non travel/non airline event where I happened to be seated at a table with some travel industry people) A certain exec of a large German airline say to the exec of a US airline, "But if you do that, how will they react on Flyertalk", and then the conversation between most people at the table for the next 10 minutes was about FT.