MacBook air dead hard drive

[Dono]

I am looking for some direction on replacing the hard drive (OS installation) on a macbook air (13 inch, early 2015).

I pulled the non-working hard drive out and replaced it with a drive adapter (Sintcech NGFF M.2 nVME SSD Adapter card and a WD Blue SN570 NVMe SSD 500GB.

When I boot using command R, I get in to the disk utility, but the hard drive is not recognized. All I see is disk0 with the OS X Base System at 1.33GB. I see guys are installing these M.2 hard drives, but I'm clearly doing something wrong.

Im not an apple guy, and am not finding any good information on my google searches.

Can anyone provide words of wisdom as to what I need to do? All tutorials seem to gloss over what needs to be done once the adapted hard drive is installed.

Thank you in advance.

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[Dono]

Here's the Sintech adapter I used:

Amazon.ca

I did create the High Sierra bootable USB using TransMac, but there is no way I can format the new hard drive if disk utility can't see it.
I'm thinking either the hard drive is not compatible, or the adapter is an issue.

 

[Dono]

Its also very possible that the MacBook Air does not have the right firmware level. I'm betting that when the hard drive crashed it had Yosemite on it, and from what I'm reading, it needed at least Mojave so the firmware written during upgrade could work with NVME.

Is there any way to upgrade the firmware on MacBook Air's via usb?