No, you do not need Bernoulli, it is merely convenient (but only if compressibility is not an issue, which it is, of course, for cruising airliners as well as s

No, you do not need Bernoulli, it is merely convenient (but only if compressibility is not an issue, which it is, of course, for cruising airliners as well as supersonic aircraft.) Bernoulli does not give you the velocity field. If you are looking for just one thing that is sufficient, it is Newton's laws applied to viscous fluids - i.e. Navier-Stokes. I may have made one mistake in that the the separation at a sharp trailing edge may be inevitable simply because of the high acceleration that would be needed to go around it, together with the impossibility of negative absolute pressures, but in more general cases, such as the flow around a sphere, the effect of the boundary layer in triggering separation is important - as it is when we consider a stall, for that matter. The Kutta condition is merely a way of putting trailing-edge separation into Kutta–Joukowski. It is not a law of nature, it is a rule of thumb that makes K-J a realistic and useful model. Conservation of mass? well, you need that, but who doubts it? You mentioned conservation of energy, and I simply pointed out that you do not need it as an additional constraint, whether or not you are using Bernoulli.