NYT search has 29 results for "aeroplane" between Jan 1, 1890 and Jan 1, 1903.
> TO FLY FROM PIKE'S PEAK.; W.F. Felts Tries His New Aeroplane at Different Altitudes. [Aug. 4, 1897] (followed soon by SNOWSTORM ON PIKE'S PEAK.; W. B. Felts Did Not Attempt His Aeroplane Flight Yesterday.)
If I redo the search with "airplane" then none of the 10 hits seem relevant. They deal with horse racing. (?!)
Google n-grams, with the American English corpus, shows "airplane" didn't become popular until about 1913, overtaking "aeroplane" within about 5 years.
> TO FLY FROM PIKE'S PEAK.; W.F. Felts Tries His New Aeroplane at Different Altitudes. [Aug. 4, 1897] (followed soon by SNOWSTORM ON PIKE'S PEAK.; W. B. Felts Did Not Attempt His Aeroplane Flight Yesterday.)
> Flying Motor Cars [Sept. 22 1901]
Some of these are clearly from Great Britain. (The latter is a reprint from The Spectator, at http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/31st-august-1901/9/fl... ). Some of these seem to refer to airships -- I don't have an NYT account to read them.
If I redo the search with "airplane" then none of the 10 hits seem relevant. They deal with horse racing. (?!)
Google n-grams, with the American English corpus, shows "airplane" didn't become popular until about 1913, overtaking "aeroplane" within about 5 years.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=airplane%2Caer...