Nigel O, EDI's runway is only a little shorter than Glasgow's (by around 600 feet) and according to someone who should know (an Emirates 777 first officer) is quite capable of getting one of their 773ERs off at max gross. And, as I said in an earlier post, the relatively small stretch of taxiway strengthening needed is not a particularly big civil engineering job as the underlying terrain is pretty solid and stable (unlike Glasgow's marshland). I doubt if anyone is planning on operating anything bigger than a 777 in the forseable future and so the problems are nowhere as large as you appear to think they are.