Even then, things occasionally go awry.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Peigneur#Drilling_disaste...>
For an airport, the precision required both to not hit extant underground infrastructure and to know precisely where your newly deployed infrastructure is (for the next guy/gal to worry about) is probably a salient concern.
I'm not sure that horizontal drilling offers that degree of precision and assurance as opposed to rip-and-dig methods.