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.
If you're not sure then you might like to forget about oil and gas drilling and look to suburban optic fibre cable laying in which a cable can be accurately laid following a curving S path about the countours of a curving road avoiding other known pipes over distances of 500+ m.
Sure they do. But then you have a tunnel under the runway that will flood and potentially freeze. Crumbling concrete and nonflat surfaces is not something you want on a runway or taxiway.
As opposed to the alternative described, where you close down the runway, dig out a full trench, lay a cable in a conduit, and attempt to compact every thing back to how it used to be?
You think that's a better alternative than just drill core'ing the conduit through?
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.