Reading the airspace is not good practice you can choose to skip — it is a required preflight step. Chapter 2 walked through the full preflight assessment § 107.49 demands before every flight; one of the elements that assessment must include, spelled out in § 107.49(a)(2), is local airspace and any flight restrictions. So determining what airspace sits over the exact spot you intend to fly, and whether anything is restricting it, is something the rule obligates you to do every time you take off — not a courtesy to Air Traffic Control, a condition of the flight being legal at all.

What you are reading for is the question the last section set up: is this site in airspace that § 107.41 makes you get authorized for — Class B, C, or D, or a surface-area Class E designated for an airport — or is it in uncontrolled airspace where none of that applies? The catch is that airspace boundaries are invisible from the ground. A Class D ring around a towered field, or the edge of a surface-area Class E, is a line on the airspace chart, not something you can see from the site. And you cannot reason it out from how the place looks: § 71.71 shows how uneven Class E is — beginning 700 or 1,200 feet up, well above you, yet reaching all the way to the surface around some airports — so a quiet field with no tower in sight can still sit inside controlled airspace. The read has to be done against current airspace information for the specific coordinates you will fly, not from memory of the general area.

The reason § 107.49(a)(2) pairs airspace with any flight restrictions is that the two behave differently. Airspace-class boundaries are fixed until the FAA redesignates them; restrictions can appear and lift day to day, and a site in ordinary uncontrolled airspace can be closed by a temporary restriction with no change to its airspace class at all — those restrictions are covered later in this chapter. Because the same rule requires you to weigh local weather in the same assessment, the read is never just "what class is this": it is the whole operating picture over the site at the time you intend to fly. When that picture shows you are in controlled airspace, the next step is getting the authorization — which is where LAANC comes in.