Thanks for your reply LnS,
As far as I know he did have a few very near misses mid-air. Nothing that has hurt him physically, though as we both recognise, mentally it's going to take a while to get over it.
I think this break will do him good but I am worried about the position of my training organisation. We have a promise that we will get a refund if it seems that you cannot complete the course. However, nothing is said about not being able to complete the training in this particular case.
The ideal situation would have been for him that he would have taken out a loss of licence insurrance, but he didn't.
It seems to me more and more that my training organisation is quite ruthless in some situations and we are treated as numbers. I hope that this will not be the case with my friend though.