One day, Travis Barker

would like to get on an aeroplane again. He won’t know when it’s coming, but he has an agreement in place with someone very close to him: they’ll tell him to be ready to go in 24 hours, and Barker will know exactly what for. He’ll pack an overnight bag and get in a car that will take him to an airport, where he’ll board a plane for the first time since 2008, when doing so changed the course of his life.

‘There are a million things that could happen to me,’ he says, sitting shirtless in a lounge chair in the garden of his longtime home in the Calabasas hills outside Los Angeles. ‘I could die riding my skateboard. I could get in a car accident. I could get shot. Anything could happen. I could have a brain aneurysm and die. So why should

I still be afraid of aeroplanes?’

Barker has every reason any person could have to never set foot on an aeroplane again. The drummer and producer, famous for his formative career with Blink-182 and for his highprofile relationships (currently with Kourtney Kardashian), is in a subset of the population so small it barely exists as a category: he is the last remaining survivor of a plane crash.

In September 2008, after playing a South Carolina show with his friend and collaborator Adam ‘DJ AM’ Goldstein, Barker boarded a private plane with AM and two close friends, assistant Chris Baker and security guard Charles ‘Che’ Still. During take-off, the tyres blew and the plane overran the runway, skidded across a highway, hit an embankment and burst into flames. The two pilots, along with Baker and Still, were killed; Barker and AM were able to escape through an emergency exit. Barker was covered in jet fuel and engulfed in flames. He sprinted across the highway on fire; AM eventually helped put it out with the shirt off his own back.

Barker, who’d already had a lifelong fear of flying, suffered thirddegree burns on two thirds of his body and spent three months in hospital, where he underwent 26 operations and multiple skin grafts. Almost a year after the accident, AM died from a drug overdose.

When you’re lucky enough to survive an ordeal that should have killed you, no one will fault you for excising that particular risk from your life, for allowing yourself the luxury of hopefully not going up in flames ever again. But Barker says he will fly again. ‘I have to,’ he says, nodding. ‘I want to make the choice to try and overcome it.’

Barker has done the work to move on from the night his life changed, to reclaim his traumatised body and mind. He learned to walk and drum again and did months of therapy; more recently, he’s got into boxing and breathwork. In February, he became one of the most unlikely faces of the Goop-paved celebrity wellness trend when he introduced his vegan CBD line, Barker Wellness Co. He’s continually working on new music, and there’s a documentary on his life in the works.

With all that recovery behind him, flying again is not only about closure. Barker also likes to imagine how redemptively normal it would feel to return home after the trip – to walk through his front door and drop a bag on to the floor and hear his kids’ voices from the other room. ‘If I do it, and the angels above help me in my travels and keep me safe, I would like to come back and [tell them], “Hey, I just flew here, and then I flew home. And everything was fine.” I have to tell them, because I almost left them,’ Barker says. He sits back and looks out across his yard, relishing a fantasy that would sound routine to almost everyone else but is still out of reach: ‘That’s a perfect day.’

A New Foundation

Before he became known, as he puts it, as ‘that dude who survived a plane crash,’ Barker was largely known as the prodigiously talented drummer for the pop-punk band Blink-182. He was born and raised in southern California, where he started taking jazz lessons and playing in a drum line at age 10. After high school, he played around in LA-area ska and punk bands and built up a reputation as an innovative and captivating drummer. In 1998, Mark Hoppus and Tom DeLonge recruited him to join Blink-182; a year later, the trio ran naked through Los Angeles for the What’s My Age Again? music video, and their album Enema Of The State went platinum.

Beyond Blink, which enjoyed huge commercial success through the early 00s, Barker’s creative life took off. He founded a clothing line, joined the punk-rap supergroup Transplants and married and started a family with the model Shanna Moakler, with whom he co-starred in MTV reality show Meet The Barkers. (It aired for less than two years – as long as the marriage lasted. The pair now share custody of their children, Landon,