How to perform a fresh install of MacOS on MacBook Air

Greetings slavenoid

If your MacBook Air model and year support macOS Monterrey, you can start up to the internet based macOS Recovery to download and install. If that doesn’t work, you’ll need to use another Mac that also supports macOS Monterrey and make a bootable installer. How to reinstall macOS

Start up from macOS Recovery

First make sure that your Mac has a connection to the internet. Then follow the appropriate steps based on whether you're using a Mac with Apple silicon:

Apple silicon

Turn on your Mac and continue to press and hold the power button until you see the startup options window. Click the gear icon labeled Options, then click Continue.

Intel processor

Turn on your Mac and immediately press and hold Command (⌘)-R until you see an Apple logo or other image.

What you're looking for is most likely a spinning world to indicate connection to the recovery options on the internet. You may need to format your hard drive to APFS first in Disk Utility, which you'll also be able to access in macOS Recovery.

For the bootable installer, this article goes over how to do that. There are some Terminal commands and though not difficult, the article is lengthy, so we’re going to recommend viewing the article instead of us providing the steps here - Create a bootable installer for macOS

Thanks.