KEEPING UP WITH Travis BARKER
ONE DAY, TRAVIS BARKER would like to get on an airplane 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’s a million things that could happen to me,” he says one unseasonably warm afternoon in late March, sitting shirtless in a lounge chair in the backyard 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 airplanes?”
Barker has every reason any person could have to never set foot on an airplane again. The drummer and producer, famous for his formative career with Blink-182 and for his high-profile 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 takeoff, the tires blew, and the plane overran the runway, skidded across
