Porrohman,
I think your answer lies somewhere in the holy trinity of airport engineering, aircraft performance engineering and airline economics.
I don’t often encounter runways which impose no limitations in terms of strength or length (excepting the Middle Eastern bedlam of Sheiks striving for the biggest and best). In the UK, most runways impose some compromise, and EDI is no exception. The essence of the answer on any runway upgrade is therefore to work out what traffic there will be (i.e. how many punters), and where they are going (route length), and that will dictate the aircraft takeoff weight and takeoff length.
I was a bit surprised when I checked the population of Edinburgh, and it showed as only 450,000. And 9 million pax/year. From the airline economist's viewpoint, that is at the bottom end of traffic needed for a decent sized airport, and I would think it might even be getting below that needed to have commercially viable B777-300ER operations on a daily basis. There is not much scope for bigger planes at smaller airports because it drops the frequencies down and the punters prefer higher frequencies. The medium sized 250 pax A330-200 is better fit at a place like Edinburgh than a 350 pax B777-300ER.
The issue of route length is a key one. The B777-300ER is a very long range plane – the map below shows its maximum range from EDI. That is pretty well non-stop anywhere in the civilised world (except Australia and New Zealand and we all know that the Antipodes is not part of the civilised world). I don’t think the traffic or market is there for those extreme range operations from EDI.
What is more likely to be viable is a medium range operation, 4000 NM. The next map shows that this gets to the Middle East (and thus by connection to anywhere else in the world), it gets direct to most of the USA and Canada, all of Europe, most of Africa, and some of Asia.
From the aircraft performance engineer's viewpoint, the 777-300ER can operate 4000 NM with reserves and at 85% headwinds, at a take off weight of 630,000 lbs carrying full pax (358 in Emirates 3 class configuration) plus a thoughtful emergency supply of pallets loaded with 100 extra cases of beer for the Scottish football fans.
The ACN at that weight is 79, which is pretty close to the 74 PCN of the 06/24 runway, and using the 10% rule, the pavement engineer is almost certain to grant a concession. A final check is still needed by the aircraft performance engineer that it will hit nothing in the climb on a hot windless day with an engine out. JT can do that
Looks like it could be a viable operation to me. Except I'd prefer to fly A330s and make more money from it.
Cheers
Overrun