Summary: By expanding the idea of B-spline curve fitting using dominant points (Park and Lee 2007 [13]), we propose a new approach to B-spline surface fitting to rectangular grid points, which is based on adaptive knot placement using dominant columns along $u$- and $v$-directions. The approach basically takes approximate B-spline surface lofting which performs adaptive multiple B-spline curve fitting along and across rows of the grid points to construct a resulting B-spline surface. In multiple B-spline curve fitting, rows of points are fitted by compatible B-spline curves with a common knot vector whose knots are computed by averaging the parameter values of dominant columns selected from the points. We address how to select dominant columns which play a key role in realizing adaptive knot placement and thereby yielding better surface fitting. Some examples demonstrate the usefulness and quality of the proposed approach.