Blink-182’s Travis Barker Opens Up 2008 Plane Crash
In 2008, Blink-182‘s Travis Barker was in a devastating plane crash that took the lives of his assistant, two flight crew members and a security guard. Barker along with DJ AM (who passed away in 2010 due to suspected drug overdose) survived the crash.
During a new interview with The Guardian, Barker opened up about the horrific experience and how it still brings him fear all of these years later.
“I couldn’t even look in the sky – I couldn’t look at a plane,” relayed Barker. “I thought every plane was going to fall out of the fucking sky. I became obsessive about it, and slowly grew out of it, but to this day when I see one, it fucks me up.”
Barker, who was speaking with The Guardian in promotion of his newly published memoirs Can I Say, was asked if he finds “strange” to have the topic of his plane crash be a “key selling point” for the book.
“Well it was never private – it was on every news channel,” noted Barker. “From the time it happened, people were asking me to talk about it, and I couldn’t. As time went on and I was no longer dealing with post-traumatic and survivor’s guilt and my own injuries … Well, there were two hard things to deal with. First, obviously, being 65% burned. And two, burying two of my best friends and the two pilots I’d just met. It was difficult. And then to have my partner, who survived with me [DJ AM], who was sober and a key factor in my sobriety, pass away of a drug overdose … That was a very traumatic chain of events to go through alone. There’s much more to the book than the plane crash, but that crash and my battle and my demons with post-traumatic is definitely something I think people can learn from and relate to.”
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