But on Friday (June 25), with an airplane emoji, the Blink-182 drummer declared in a tweet, “I might fly again.”
Last month, in an interview with Men’s Health magazine, Barker — who hasn’t been on a plane since the day of the crash in 2008 — said surviving the accident, and the long recovery that followed, inspired him to get clean.
“People are always like, ‘Did you go to rehab?'” Barker, who had developed such a high opioid tolerance that he’d sometimes wake up during surgery, said. “And I [say], ‘No, I was in a plane crash.’ That was my rehab. Lose three of your friends and almost die? That was my wake-up call. If I wasn’t in a crash, I would have probably never quit.”
“There’s a million things that could happen to me,” he added in the interview. “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?”
Of flying again, he told the magazine, “I have to … I want to make the choice to try and overcome it.”