Hi William,
I've landed the L20 (the Canadian Beaver) on a few roads, but they were roads inside fences, leading to radar sites. I'd do that sometimes when the site's dirt runway was too muddy or otherwise screwed up to make landing on it safe.
When I was at Malmstrom AFB outside Great Falls, Montana in the mid fifties I had a friend who was a fantastic pilot. He had somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 hours. Sometimes I flew with him, and I learned a lot about flying from him. Let's call him "Coop" (since Cooper was his name). Coop and I were in the 29th Air Division of Air Defense Command, but Malmstrom was a Strategic Air Command base.
One day Coop was taxiing out in an L20 to go somewhere. I don't remember for sure what airplanes SAC was flying out of Malmstrom at the time. I think it was B47's. In any case they had a runway that was more than two miles long. The L20 could get airborne in about two hundred feet, so since he was near the upwind end of the runway Coop asked the tower for permission to take off from where the second taxiway joined the runway. That would give him about five times as much runway as he needed. The tower denied his request, so Coop started taxiing toward the downwind end, two miles away. He taxied faster and faster, became airborne, flew past the tower windows, and landed on the taxiway near the end of the runway.
I don't remember whether or not he got permission to take off after that stunt, but, of course, there was a huge flap over the whole thing. Fortunately for Coop, the SAC base commander was a colonel. But the Air Division commander was a general, and among his other duties, Coop was the general's pilot. The general slapped Coop's hand, but not very hard, and eventually the whole thing was forgotten.
I still crack up when I remember that fiasco.
