The Blink-182 drummer narrowly escaped death when the private Learjet he and his TRV$DJAM bandmate Adam 'DJ AM' Goldstein boarded in South Carolina crashed and exploded before take off.

Barker was left with severe burns over 60 per cent of his body, and he spent more than 11 weeks in hospitals and burn centres, undergoing 27 surgeries and skin grafts.

He has since opened up about the tragedy, which killed the two pilots and two of his friends, in his new memoir, Can I Say: Living Large, Cheating Death, and Drums, Drums, Drums.

Promoting the book with a candid interview on U.S. breakfast show Good Morning America on Tuesday (20Oct15), he revealed the excruciating pain from his burns felt "like hell", and he was ready to take his own life.

"I would call friends of mine and say, 'Yo, I'll deposit $1 million into whoever's bank account (if you help me end my life...)," he said. "They had to take my phone out of my room (to stop me calling)."

Barker credits his two young children with ex-wife Shanna Moakler with pulling him through, but he knows the accident was just as tough on nine-year-old daughter Alabama and 12-year-old son Landon as it was on him.

"It was just hard for them to see me in the state that I was in," he continued. "They colour in class (and) everyone's drawing pictures of their family or what they did at the weekend, and Landon's drawing a picture of a plane crashing."

Choking up, he added, "It was definitely something that... I mean, he was old enough to understand."

Barker, who grew up with a fear of flying, has not stepped on a plane since the accident, but he is not ruling out air travel in the future: "I tell my children when you're ready to fly, I'm ready to fly."

The rocker, 39, recently admitted he experienced plane crash nightmares leading up to the 2008 flight, and had a bad feeling about the journey even as he stepped on the tarmac to board the plane.

But he wasn't the only one - he claims little Alabama also had an eerie premonition, telling her father, "The roof's gonna come off, Daddy", shortly before he left for the trip to South Carolina.