The Pacific Aviation Museum Pearl Harbor is taking the wraps off an eye-popping international orange and white paint job on Ford Island’s iconic control tower just in time for the museum’s annual big fundraiser tonight and the 70th anniversary of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack next week.

"It is absolutely beautiful," Ken DeHoff, the nonprofit museum’s executive director, said of the tower’s new look.

The restoration and repainting is part of an $8 million effort to renovate and reuse one of the most visible symbols of Pearl Harbor’s war years.

About 400 people are attending tonight’s fundraiser at the museum, and attendees will get a close-up look at the refurbished tower.

Bill Paty is being recognized with the first Building Bridges Award. Sixteen members of the Wounded Warrior Project also will be honored at the gala.

Paty parachuted into Normandy on D-Day, was a former plantation manager, CEO and president of Wai­alua Sugar Co., and is a civilian aide emeritus to the secretary of the Army for the Pacific.

DeHoff said a museum goal is to weave itself into the community and that Paty "helped us tell the story of the military and make sure the military understood what the civilian population needed to have also."

As far back as 1996, planners of an aviation museum on Ford Island envisioned leasing the landmark tower from the Navy. The Navy, museum and Ford Island Ventures — the property landlord — finally signed the deal on Sept. 2, 2010.

On Dec. 7, 1941, one of the first radio broadcasts of the Pearl Harbor attack was made from the shorter "aerological tower" in the complex.

The taller water tank tower was a dark color at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, with the crow’s nest observation deck atop it completed in 1942, officials said.

"We’re pretty well done with the exterior stabilization of the tower itself," DeHoff said. "We still have to work on the operations building, but the tower part itself is done."

DeHoff said the museum is nearly $1 million over budget because the upper observation deck was found to have extensive corrosion and needed a lot of structural repair work.

The Zelinsky Co., which painted the tower, recommended changing the paint to a type it had been using on Coast Guard ships, but was about $20,000 more, DeHoff said.

"We just didn’t have it — and Zelinsky came back and said, ‘We want to donate that to you, because we know that it’s that much better paint,’" DeHoff said.

DeHoff used to get complaints from museum visitors about the control tower’s longtime neglect. That’s now changed.

"Everyone who looks at it just is in awe," he said.