Macbook Air 2011, upgrade to highest Mac OS X, but "can't download the additional components needed"

Hello daschrislydon, 

Thanks for reaching out to the Apple Support Communities! From your message I can see that you have erased the 2011 MacBook Air and are looking to upgrade the OS X from Lion. 

You're correct that you need to upgrade to OS X El Capitan before you can upgrade to macOS High Sierra. 

Since you're unable to reinstall the Mac OS X Lion through Recovery, see if you can boot into Internet Recovery. To access Internet Recovery, restart your MacBook Air and hold down Option + Command + R. This will allow you to reinstall OS X Lion.

By reinstalling Lion you'll have access to the App Store and you can follow the steps to upgrade to OS X El Capitan: How to upgrade to OS X El Capitan. 

Once you have OS X El Capitan running, you can then upgrade to macOS  High Sierra: How to upgrade to macOS High Sierra. 

If you're unable to reinstall OS X Lion, you'll need to have access to another Mac to be able to create a bootable USB drive for El Capitan. This article will provide you with the steps to take to create a bootable installer: How to create a bootable installer for macOS. 

All the best!

Maybe as a community specialist you can ask the relevant department at Apple why so many people are

getting the same error of "Can't download the additional components needed to install Max OS X"

when trying to download Lion from the recovery servers. This error usually points to the certificate for the software

being expired. Now we know the certificates for many mac OS's expired in October 2019, but it looks like Apple

has not bothered updating the certificates on the software available on the Recovery servers.

As it is now almost 4 months since these certificates expired then it does seem inexplicable that people are still experiencing

problems downloading and installing OS's from Lion up to and including macOS Sierra.

Perhaps you could take some time to look over the Lion, El Capitan and macOS Sierra communities pages of the past few months to see how many people are experiencing these problems trying to download Apple operating systems

and then pass it on to the relevant department for assessment and hopefully get a fix in the near future.

Please note the error with the macOS Sierra downloaded from, How to upgrade to macOS Sierra - Apple Support

the Install macOS Sierra.app is unable to be used by the createinstallmedia command in Terminal to make a bootable

USB installer, it reports the error /Volumes/MyVolume is not a valid mount point. This is not a user error rather an error in the coding of the install app, too many users are reporting this error to be a failing on their part. I myself can makeUSB installers

for all macOS's from El Capitan, High Sierra, Mojave and Catalina, the only one that fails is Sierra, so maybe you could research that one. Note Apple released an updated version of Sierra in October 2019 with a new valid certificate and it is this version that causes the problem. Those of us who have pre October 2019 Sierra versions can make bootable USB installers without issue.

I look forward to your reply and answer.

Hi daschrislydon,

Thanks for letting us know what worked.

If you run into any other issues, don't hesitate to reach out here on the Apple Support Communities.

Cheers!