Passengers question response when tornado hit Omaha airport [Video]

Barely six minutes before an EF3 tornado destroyed hangars and planes at Eppley Airfield, Cody Weihe of Lincoln huddled with about 50 other passengers in a stairway in Concourse B, staring at a weather app on his phone and worrying about his safety.

“I’m looking at the radar. It doesn’t look great,” Weihe recalled of that April day.

But even as the storm cell bore down on Eppley, airport security officers started telling Weihe and others that they had to leave the shelter and go through TSA security again.

“At that point, they’re shooing us out of this secure area,” he said. “A lady keeps yelling at us, ‘You’ve got to go, you’ve got to go.’”

Weihe and others left the stairway, only to be returned to the shelter minutes later — just as the tornado hit the airport property and badly damaged the general aviation side of the field, …